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1Aramini
2# *A BORROWED MAN*: THE ABOLITION OF HUMANITY
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4Readers who have followed me this far have my gratitude, and must forgive me a slight deviation from the usual pattern. The publication of Gene Wolfe’s 2015 *A Borrowed Man* marks a slight shift from subtext to text, and a return to some of the preoccupations evident in his writing throughout the 1970s. Once upon a time, Wolfe had planned that the novella eventually published in 1978 as “The Doctor of Death Island” would become a novel tentatively named *In Greyhame Prison*. Readers of the novella might recall the apocalyptic future the murderous protagonist faced after being cryogenically frozen until a viable treatment for his stomach cancer was developed. Alas, even with the medical advancements that forestalled death and aging, he was still trapped in prison, serving a life sentence.
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6One of the most interesting aspects of that tale’s setting involved Alan Alvard’s creation of the Genre Gin, a means by which people might speak to their favorite characters from fiction. In the novella, Alvard’s invention creates a world of functional illiteracy; the need for art to outlive humans and the desire to forge meaningful relationships soon loses focus, petering out in a dark and dreary world with the promise of an eternal life completely devoid of hope and meaning. *A Borrowed Man* plays with many of the same themes, even featuring a more or less contemporary personality being thrust into the future. Figures of entertainment are similarly brought to life, though in *A Borrowed Man*, rather than Dickens’s characters, we see reclones of authors kept in an almost carceral system within the library, largely forgotten and living on shelves without freedom, denied recognition as human beings. In a way, these writers given new life are facing the same terminal sentence with which Alan Alvard coped in “The Doctor of Death Island” – when they cease to be checked out or consulted, they will be burnt. However, another library somewhere else might repeat the same cycle, birthing another victim instilled with old memories to be violated, ignored, and ultimately incinerated.
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8The setting of *A Borrowed Man* could have been cobbled together from many of Wolfe’s near future SF tales from the 1970s: simulated cab drivers, robot servants, styles that bare breasts, and a vastly reduced population were all motifs scattered throughout his early stories, including “Remembrance to Come,” “Sonya, Crane Wessleman, and Kittee,” “Beautyland,” “Slaves of Silver,” “The Dark of the June,” and more. While it occupies the same spiritual vein as many of these stories, a metafictionally poignant theme emerges in *A Borrowed Man*. We know that books have the power to take us to places that we have never seen and never shall, and that the people who once composed their words may have been silenced by time; one thing that books cannot do is make their authors truly live again. In this future, the best attempt has been made to resurrect the personalities and memories of the departed, though they are cruelly treated as mere library resources and prevented from writing anything new, for fear that it will devalue what came before.
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10When Ern A. Smithe, the narrator of *A Borrowed Man*, is checked out, he verbalizes the promise and allure of the system: 
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12>“You fully humans have our books already, and our books are better than we are. Better than we can be, really. But what the books give you is one thing and what we can give you is another. You’ve got *A Christmas Carol* and *Oliver Twist*, *The Old Curiosity Shop*, and a lot more. *David Copperfield* and *Bleak House* and in fact just about everything Charles Dickens wrote. But you don’t have Charles Dickens. You would spend a lot now if you could get his DNA and one scan, but if you were willing to spend a hundred times that much you still couldn’t get them. You’d like to ask him how he really felt about Kate, and about that actress. How he had intended to finish *Edwin Drood* - and so would I” (Wolfe 53).
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14Usually, my theses for many of Wolfe’s novels from *The Fifth Head of Cerberus* to *The Wizard Knight* and *The Sorcerer’s House* are generally emphatically (and stubbornly?) argued; my goal is that they are in line with Wolfe’s ultimate intentions grounded in my own observations. However, I would like to open our discussion of *A Borrowed Man* with some of the reviews and opinions from others. After all, the potential afterlife of an author is predicated upon the response of the mass of his or her readers, for better or for worse. Once a defenseless and child-like book, spontaneously generated from the mind of the author (like Athena sprung from the head of Zeus, eh?), is released into the wild upon publication, it is deflowered, plundered, and perhaps butchered by the eyes of the madding crowd - you and I, the readers of today, tomorrow, and yesterday - to rend its secrets or its plot wholesale to serve our own insatiable needs (if it isn’t remaindered, burned, or ignored outright, that is.)
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16## Between Readers, Writers, and Texts
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18Who then, shall have the authority over what has been written? One man or woman may say one thing, another something else quite different and perhaps incompatible with the first assertion; one person’s fervent dream can be another’s abject nightmare and fear; one’s postcolonial problems can be the fulfillment of another’s imperial hopes and desires. We have already mentioned that the seed of this novel might reside in the 1970s, and several initial reviewers seemed to hone in on this fact. In a review by Writer Dan of Wolfe’s 2015 novel, that very detail seems to come to the surface. Of the denouement of the novel, Dan says:
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20>The revelation, while solidifying the idea that this is indeed science fiction, was somewhat dated. This seemed more a book that you’d find had been published thirty-some-odd years ago instead of anywhere near recently. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest to find that this was a trunk novel resurrected from the annals of Mr. Wolfe’s past and then shined up for a more recent publication. Granted, I have nothing to suggest that it actually is. It just kind of felt like that. You know?
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22While there might be some kernel of truth in the inspiration for the story, other reviewers (and this time there are many, featuring page upon page of slight plot summary and reaction, most kindly refusing to reveal the ending beyond the reviewer’s reaction to it) pick up on the nature of the novel’s allusive tone. Dave Truesdale’s review for *Tangent Online* emphasizes the genre homage inherent in the decisions Wolfe made in constructing *A Borrowed Man*:
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24>I found the story to be a well-designed 50/50 marriage of 1930s pulpish SF and the now classic noir detective murder mystery formula first given us by Dashiell Hammett in the 1920s and early 1930s (with his Continental Op and then Sam Spade hard-boiled detectives) and then copied and made popular by many another noir detective novelist. To be more accurate, however, I wouldn't consider *The Borrowed Man* [sic] a noir novel in the classic sense (dark, brooding, gritty, scenes drawn in shifting shades of light and dark throughout), though the rest of its formulaic trappings certainly fit the mold. And in place of the hard-boiled detective (Sam Spade, Mickey Spillane, Philip Marlowe, et al), we are given a lead character (about which more in a moment) filling the detective role more in the soft-boiled detective vein (The Saint, Nero Wolfe, Nick Charles, et al).
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26>Background and setup for the science-fictional half of the novel finds us in the 22nd century. Technology has now given a smaller, more affluent and apparently less-stressed world population (one billion, which is in the ballpark of actual government 1920s population stats) many comforts, mostly of a benign nature (though this world has its dark elements as well, mostly in the background), one of which is the aircar—here with flitters and hovercabs—that SF has dreamed of since its earliest days. Unique to *The Borrowed Man* and from which the novel derives its title, are fully functioning clones (via the DNA from once-living authors) embedded with the last-uploaded personalities of a book's author. These clones are shelved in large libraries and can be checked out—borrowed—as would any book in one of today's libraries. Having an author's work preserved is in itself valuable, of course, but to be able to consult, to pose questions of the actual author is something else again. But what a whacky idea! Why not have the last author personality upload on a small disc along with his or her book or books, rather than (when not in use) a life-sized human clone shelved in unending horizontal cubicles in what must be an immense library? And the same arrangement in branch libraries as well? How would this really work? Well, some of the details are alluded to with some seemingly reasonable explanations (but not in any depth and only to a certain point), but just as many of the bizarre, crazy ideas in SF pulp magazine fiction were wild and imaginative and “really cool” were explained with handwavium science, or were just plain impossible according to the laws of physics, it was the boldness and audacity of the idea that endeared them to the hearts and minds of readers [sic]. So too, I imagine, is the case here, with the offbeat and somehow emotional appeal of libraries not only shelving books, but the closest we can come to checking out the actual authors themselves by way of human clones. And, let us not overlook, making this high-tech advance affordable to many and profitable for the libraries (clones can give advice and information in-library for one fee, and be rented out—borrowed—for a much higher fee).
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28Truesdale’s acknowledgement of the pulp elements really does make sense of some of Wolfe’s design decisions. Of course, he is not alone in identifying these inspirations. The review ends by acknowledging the place the reader’s previous experiences will have in enjoying the book:
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30>The reading protocols with which one comes to the book will in large measure determine its success or failure on an individual basis. If read one way—as an obvious homage to the classic murder/detective novel of the 1930s [and] '40s, replete with, and capturing the era's social conventions (i.e. the relationship between men and women of that time, for but a single issue)—chances are it will be received favorably; if read, for example, from a contemporary feminist or other social issue viewpoint it might fail miserably, if such an issue-specific protocol were to be inappropriately applied.
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32>Be all that as it may, there are two mysteries left for the reader to solve: on the science fiction side, what is the coded secret hidden within the pages of E. A. Smithe's *Murder on Mars* that people are willing to kill for; and on the murder mystery side who killed X—whodunit?
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34We shall return to the idea that these kinds of issue-specific analyses might be misapplied to Wolfe’s 2015 novel soon. However, a reader might be totally justified in claiming that most of Wolfe’s late novels are constructed around intentional homage, in a kind of nostalgia for the works which have fallen out of vogue or been left behind by our contemporary readers. Does every octogenarian remember youthful literary loves with more fondness than the trends (short-lived from a long perspective, no doubt) that supplanted and replaced them?
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36Camestros Felapton’s Wordpress review of the novel expresses the risks of reviewing Wolfe objectively while also acknowledging that there is a very particular pattern in the late novels of his career:
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38>In Gene Wolfe’s 2010 novel *The Sorcerer’s House*, Wolfe presents a typically odd narrative involving a man recently released from prison who finds himself in a strange house full of unresolved mystery within a story about an oddly authoritarian father figure. The genre of the novel might be best described as fantasy.
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40>In Gene Wolfe’s 2013 novel, *The Land Across*, Wolfe presents a typically odd narrative involving a man recently arrived in a foreign country who finds himself in a strange house full of unresolved mystery within a story about an oddly authoritarian father figure/national dictator. The novel mixes a Kafkaesque story about a police state with horror themes including a quasi-Transylvanian setting.
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42>In Gene Wolfe’s 2015 novel, *A Borrowed Man*, Wolfe presents a typically odd narrative involving a cloned author who is borrowed from a library and who finds himself in a strange house full of unresolved mystery within a story about an oddly authoritarian father figure. The novel is ostensibly a mix of noirish detective fiction and a kind of retro-future science fiction.
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44>I don’t know if Wolfe intends that these books be read as a set but together I kept feeling waves of *déjà vu* even though the detail, settings and arcs of the stories are quite different. In each we are presented with mysteries whose framing becomes gradually irrelevant and whose resolution feels unimportant.
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46(I hope that my analysis of *The Sorcerer’s House*, at least, would argue that the resolution we as readers can achieve with limitless effort, brain-racking, and myth-mining is actually of the utmost importance, and that it makes a difference in our understanding of the book as a whole - themes, characters, and all). The presence of ubiquitous authoritarian figures in Wolfe’s late fiction, however, does bring up the concept, free word association or not, of authority in interpretation, something which I feel criticism of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has of course been concerned with strongly. Gene Wolfe will always be a complicated author to discuss because reception of his work often involves drawing precise and obscure plot distinctions which can snare even the most sophisticated readers. (For an example of this, see John Clute’s infamous claim that the Autarch is Severian’s mother. Thankfully, *The Urth of the New Sun* features a scene in which Severian remembers being castrated as the old Autarch, whose memories he has attained, forever cutting off this interpretation as a fully valid one endorsed by the plot Wolfe established. As we hope to emphasize below, Clute is a penetrating and insightful reader, one of the most important in the field of Science Fiction, yet he, too, is capable of plot misreadings in Wolfe.)
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48I have always maintained there is an important difference between reception and plot – they are two completely independent factors of the fictional edifice: anyone can say that Wolfe writes women terribly and that his men are abusive cads, and create an argument from the text to support his or her ideas. If one denies the distance between an author and his or her art, then one might even attribute the attitudes of some of the men in Wolfe’s work to the author himself. On a plot level, however, if someone was to claim that Hamlet survives Shakespeare’s play, or that Number Five is not a clone in *The Fifth Head of Cerberus*, then that interpreter has entered the territory of objective error. What then, of the plans that go into the composition of a work? Yet who can say with any certainty what writers like James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, William Shakespeare, or even Gene Wolfe intended, as we are left with only the sentences on the page (or, recently, the screen)? Can inference, especially of subtext, ever achieve objectivity? Felapton ends the review of *A Borrowed Man* with just such a question: “Is this novel a brilliant piece of craftsmanship, possibly too clever for its own readers, or is it just a weird, meandering mess? I don’t know.”
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50Some other critics bring up the influence of even more sources, and are generally positive in their overall assessment of the novel. Joan Gordon’s “The Haunted Library of Gene Wolfe” insists:
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52>*A Borrowed Man*, Gene Wolfe’s newest novel, is a ghost story; all of his novels are in one way or another. Here the ghosts are memories, as they always are, at least on a metaphorical level, and since science fiction literalizes metaphors, these ghosts haunt libraries, characters, the writer, and his readers through both memory and invention. …
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54>But back to the ghosts. My plot summary indicates some of the ways in which a reader may be haunted by allusions this novel. There is the reclone’s name, reminiscent of E. E. “Doc” Smith, a beloved SF writer of the golden age whose books may not be flying off the shelves anymore and thus are in danger of disappearing from libraries. Or perhaps it reminds us of Clark Ashton Smith, whose “The Hashish Eater –or– The Apocalypse of Evil” (1920) is quoted late in the book. He too may no longer be checked out of the library, and his work, which ranges over SF, fantasy, and horror, between prose and poetry, may be close to Wolfe’s heart. This character, however, writes mystery stories, and the plot, with its sinister family and jungle greenhouse — although it’s not a greenhouse, it’s an actual jungle on another planet — invokes Raymond Chandler’s *The Big Sleep* (1939). And the jungle world: Is that a reference to Wolfe’s middle volume of *The Book of the Short Sun*, *In Green’s Jungles* (2000)? The reader is haunted by these and other literary references.
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56Gordon also seems to have more sympathy with the agency and artistry inherent in the decisions of an author as artist:
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58>The writer may be haunted, too. As is true for authors in general, Wolfe’s characters must haunt his imagination, arise out of his memories, and so gain substance. Beyond that, his narrator is an author: that is, the memories of the narrator are those of an author. In thinking about what the novel says about the relationship between author and narrator, I began to understand why my expectations are irrelevant. Wolfe’s decision to write more sparingly goes beyond the writer’s workshop dictum of showing versus telling. Wolfe demonstrates here that the writer changes over time, that he is a human with different ways of being at different times in his life. In *The Fifth Head of Cerberus* (1972) he showed the stagnation of cloning one’s self, one’s ideas, one’s ways of being: what might have been a step toward greater things becomes stepping in place, and nothing and no one changes. Here the writer, E. A. Smithe, is trapped in a new body, one that longs to speak in its own voice and does so when he writes, but when he speaks, he is enslaved to the old “writerly” voice controlled by memories that are not his own. Wolfe is trapped in a body that is getting older all the time (as they do) but doesn’t want the writer inside to stagnate by repeating past modes. Rather than an old voice in a young body, like the reclone’s, Wolfe’s newer writing may demonstrate new voices in the old body of the experienced writer, in the body of work.
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60Finally, Gordon notes one of the most important thematic strains in a novel about the callous and inhuman treatment of once living humans who have desires and dreams but have become nothing but library resources:
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62>Libraries and other archives have haunted Wolfe’s fiction since *The Fifth Head of Cerberus*. In the dystopic and empty future of *The Borrowed Man* [sic], books are almost obsolete, yet they hold a great importance for the characters in the novel: a book is a literal key to the mystery, and to great treasure. Print, as produced on a keyboard, is the only way for two of the characters to express themselves. Smithe, in the literary voice of his originary writer, stresses the importance of books. First, “they hold millions upon millions of secrets […] A few hundred of those secrets may be enormous.” Second, “[b]ooks — real books printed on paper — were the heart and soul of a whole culture.” Their repositories, then, preserve the memory and culture of a people. If libraries die, if books are burned when people stop reading them, then cultures die as well: “Cultures are like people, it seems. Sure, they get old and die; but sometimes they die even when they are not very old at all.”
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64Finally, in intricate and referential prose, John Clute takes a stab at *A Borrowed Man* with this opening sally:
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66>There Are Doors into this Book, though it is no laughing matter to pass inside, and the main door is shut in our face for ever more. Once the stark impersonally staged rooms it's mostly told within have been traversed, one might almost be able to say this is the saddest story I have ever heard, even though *A Borrowed Man*, which tells a tale out of the old age of the author of *Peace* (1975), may not be quite the most adamantly terminal novel Gene Wolfe has ever written. But there is no light at the end of the tunnels interrogated by its eponymous narrator, Ern A. Smithe (an urn in which a smith resides, a maker you can rent), and just before his tale concludes—a tale he is telling us in retrospect: every word of *A Borrowed Man* is overdue—he is responsible for the shutting of a final door on the only light that could have possibly shone into this cruel world. The closing of that door—conveyed as usual with Wolfe seemingly *en passant*—darkens backwards the entire text, scrubs the tale free of any readerly assumption that the pervasive "torpidity" it depicts is laid down in error, is anything but the heart of the matter. *A Borrowed Man* does not escape from prison through doors; it is a prison upon which the doors have shut.
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68Clute’s identification of the book as a kind of prison is perhaps apt, though who, we might ask, is trapped within it? He continues:
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70>Here we run into a dilemma for readers familiar to anyone who has encountered Wolfe before: as this reviewer has said more than once over the forty years he has been attempting to lay down timely responses to Gene Wolfe's novels on their first appearance, there is no first reading of any of them. What may seem patently wrong with *A Borrowed Man* on a first run-through—its flattened affect; the transparent callus through which each character's inner being must be mouthed in a diction which has been censored; its adherence to the law that a detective novel should move from puzzle to solution to return, which in this case should not be confused with redemption—seems, on reflection, exactly to the point of the tale. […]
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72>Smithe is discovered inhabiting a bland, banal, immensely cruel world that his reclone seems to have been engineered to operate in without experiencing trauma or even serious affect. Smithe himself seems sufficiently isomorphous with his mask not to go mad in the cage he now occupies: though human by appearance, in this desiccated, fined-down world he is, for all intents and purposes, a kind of book. He has been sterilized. … (We are never told exactly how the world reduced its population to something like a billion now, with further reductions planned, but it is clear that eugenicist arguments, applied with a fervour and efficiency that puts to shame the actions of the Nazi government from 1933 on, have justified innumerable deaths. Even now, in the deathlike aftermath world Smithe adjusts to, "defective" human beings—we meet one who is mute—continue to be destroyed when discovered.)
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74>Beyond an array of unspoken but diegetically conspicuous restraints on his behaviour, Smithe/reclone has been specifically engineered or conditioned, on pain of incineration (again), not to write: for nothing new is permitted in this world, nothing that might corrupt the product, disturb the terminal peace of this utopia. […]
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76>Smithe more or less inadvertently works out that the contents of the novel he'd written more than a century earlier are in fact irrelevant, despite the mild mystery of its survival so long; but that its covers have been converted into electronic keys—as in early twenty-first-century hotels—with which he gains through an upper-storey door secret access to and control over a mysterious low-gravity garden world. Several characters are introduced, who contribute to detective-story-like confusions and solutions, and who at times—Wolfe has always had a tendency to follow the dots of sidebar—clutter up the action. Smithe is tortured more than once, which he describes in a controlled voice.
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78>As the end approaches he learns some truths: that Colette's father's wealth comes from emeralds brought from this other green world; that the twenty-second-century dystopia he's trapped in has been smitten by the devastating varieties of entropic loss and resource depletion and spiritlessness visible just beyond the horizons of 2015; that, as already hinted, in order to survive its rulers have opted for a savagely enforced cultural and scientific "torpidity" which, for all its deathliness, may be preferable to the planet's experiencing again what, given sufficient new energies, Loki-fingered *Homo sapiens* might be capable of; and that, as in the SF of our youth, the garden world he has discovered is in fact a portal to the universe. At this point Wolfe quotes several lines from "The Hashish-Eater," a poem by Clark Ashton Smith:
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80>Bow down: I am the emperor of dreams;
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82>I crown me with the million colored suns
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84>Of secret worlds incredible …
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86>Bad poetry, perhaps, but it lies right at the sad iron heart of *A Borrowed Man.* Smithe now solves Cob's murder; himself murders or, which is the same thing, effectively causes the terrible death of a person who has endangered him; and bars forever the door through the garden into new Edens to harvest. The denier of dreams, having buried deep his book, then returns to his library shelf, with a lot of money in his pants. We may guess that he may use some of this cash to game the system sufficiently to dismantle his conditioning so he can "write" the book we are reading. We may even guess he remembers where he buried the key. But we are not told if this is the case.
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88Clute makes some excellent points about both the characterization and the stakes involved in *A Borrowed Man*, then turns to the tenor of the book and its conclusion in comparison with some of Gene Wolfe’s earlier work:
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90>Most of Wolfe's greatest earlier narratives—primarily the twelve volumes of the *Book* sequence—have each tended to close in on an aura of something like transcendence, sometimes nothing more manifest than a sense that the exultant teller of the tale has been recognized by a gaze from beyond the page, sometimes a slingshot that carries him beyond the prison of the book: "Good fishing!" Not here. *A Borrowed Man* is not a *jeu d'esprit* but a trap without exit. The world it depicts has been shut. It is the book of someone who has lived a long time, but who knows he is going to burn to death. Like the books of other old men and women, it may seem thrown-off, schematic, lacking the *saeva indignatio* poundage that booms the books of younger authors. But the casual buoyancy of *A Borrowed Man* is a trick of the lighting. The light is rage.
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92And I shall extend that rage to the zeitgeist of our own age, in which many actions considered forbidden in previous eras are endorsed and encouraged as rights even as simple words seem to have consequences far, far beyond the original intention of the speaker. The final review I shall quote embodies much of the injustice Ern A. Smithe faces, for rather than treating the book as a thing independent of its artist, our reviewer, Matt Hlinak, decides to extend his critique of a novel to the borders of ageism and *ad hominem*:
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94>It is a shame that, for all of his talents and half-a-century of novel-writing experience, Wolfe struggles to write female characters. And though he is capable of imagining truly fantastic worlds, the position of women in those worlds never changes. In 2015, this flaw is so distracting that it drowns the interesting things *A Borrowed Man* has to say—likely influenced by Wolfe’s Catholic faith—about important issues like slavery, population control, disability, pornography and resource depletion. But like Ern A. Smithe, Gene Wolfe is sadly a writer living outside of his own time.
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96Did Hlinak just call Wolfe a dinosaur and imply that he has lived for too long, and that the world has left him behind? This, then, is exactly the response which results in the treatment of authors as antiquated and disposable library resources – in some ways, it is the perfect response to *A Borrowed Man* because it proves that even in a sensitive age, hyperaware of all of the problematic issues which confront us on the cusp of tomorrow, we can still be blind to deep-seated attitudes that enable just such a marginalization of the past, in this case, an attitude towards those whom we feel time has left behind, voiced without respect or second thought. Just as the reclones are no longer allowed to speak with their natural voices or to write anything new, it now seems popular to hold artists to a strict and one-dimensional contemporary standard, almost like a checklist, which must not be deviated from, lest their work is cast into the fire, along with their memory.
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98Now that we have interrogated the response of other readers to a text, and seen how often the person of the writer has been invoked without irony, let us reduce this equation to the book, you, and me.
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100## Why Are You Doing This to Me, Marc?
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102I was writing up the final essays in this project, dear reader, and realized that even near the end, it still seemed an infinite amount of work, and that I was, even after all these endless explications, still a bit confused. It was in this instant of confusion that I realized for the first time that I am in some degree insane. (Worry not, my faithful companion: I would not do anything to you I wouldn’t do to myself.)
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104## The Nature of Reality, the Abstract, and Authorship
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106At one point in the novel, Colette and Ern meet with an astrophysicist named Dr. Roglich, who smokes a “mutated herb” he places in his pipe (Wolfe 77). While the things they discuss may resonate more or less with the plot, they might have more intrinsic worth to our investigation as a quite separate discussion of the objective nature of reality. Of Colette’s father Conrad Coldbrook, Dr. Roglich says:
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108>”He was interested in the fundamental nature of space. Our physical universe exists in space. In that respect, it differs from all the others. Take the mathematical universe, for example. The ancient Greeks discovered that there was an invariable relationship between the diameter of a circle and its circumference. Please note that I did not say they invented it, I said that they discovered it. Was it their thinking about the possibility of such a relationship that brought the actual relationship into existence?” (78)
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110Colette obligingly answers, “[T]hinking about things doesn’t make them happen, or make them true either.” Here, we get the idea that a truth may exist independently of thought, and this concept can apply to both the universe around us in terms of physical laws and even to the abstract world of the novel. It is entirely possible that Dickens had planned a conclusion to his unfinished *Mystery of Edwin Drood* and then left scattered hints that would make sense in retrospect. On the other hand, it is also conceivable that Dickens was simply making up his plot on the fly. Our perception of the text would not alter the reality of its composition in any conceivable fashion, save in giving us something to talk about as readers uninvolved in the physical writing of the novel (while still being intimately involved in the world of its reception.) It is also possible that someone or something can fall from a tenth-story window without being aware of gravity – these things happen, but the laws of gravity must, like so many others, be obeyed, regardless of our knowledge of them.
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112Back in his office, Dr. Roglich asserts, “If we admit that principle, the fixed relationship between circumference and diameter must have existed long before any human thought of it. Before there were humans, and indeed before there was life. Where was it, Ms. Coldbrook? … We’ll call it the Mathematical Universe” (79). I have often argued that much of Wolfe’s fiction has the precision of a word problem – a rigorous and Mathematical Universe for us to play in – but what are its rules? At the very least, Roglich is implying that some rules are independent of subjective observation and thought.
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114Dr. Roglich then goes on to ask if the universe has boundaries, considering the vast nature of space itself. “Where did all that space come from? All that emptiness? It can hardly have summoned itself into being. Let us say that in the beginning there was nothing. Endless ages of nothing stretching infinitely into the past? If that were so, what prompted creation after endless ages of infinite and utterly empty intergalactic space? Notice that space is something we generally have to create” (81). While this may or may not explain the strange locked door in the Coldbrook residence leading to a seemingly distant world, it does seem to beg the question of a creator or authority for all things, even, as we perceive it, space which contains nothing. Here, Wolfe is demanding that we consider the hand of a creator in the existence of that vast space – does something ever come from nothing? At least regarding the plot, however, Dr. Roglich soon admits that equipment capable of manipulating or creating space could not be constructed, in his opinion (82). Where, then, did that door to an alien planet which Ern will pass in and out of come from, and how is it maintained? Metaphorically, of course, fiction is always opening up vast and impossible vistas that, even though they do not physically exist, can be shared between others long after the creator has vanished. Given this brief textual interrogation of reality, authority, and, oddly, borrowed space, let us turn to the plot of *A Borrowed Man* before picking at the very cleverly hidden fracture points in the plot. While some readers might feel that this novel is one of the most straightforward books that Wolfe has ever composed, there are spaces and gaps in the plot that are missing, perhaps even purloined. Dr. Roglich warns us that when spaces are stolen and applied elsewhere, the atmosphere might be affected:
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116>“The temperature of the room plummeted abruptly. The architecture of the building became somewhat odd, and possibly weaker; but all that had to happen if my lounge was to contain the additional space that had been thrust into it. … Nor is that all. If I have not frozen to death, I will eventually discover that the building across the street is nearer my own. How could it be otherwise when space between the two buildings has been removed?” (82)
117
118We should keep in mind that one of the dominant motifs throughout the novel involves the dichotomy between hot and cold. At the start, when Ern dangles his feet in the cool stream with Colette Coldbrook, he imagines an Edenic kind of existence, but every time he is tortured or the threat of pain enters the equation, the idea of burnt feet quickly comes up, an image given ultimate expression in the incinerator that waits for the reclones when they have lived out their usefulness. Here, the stealing of space shows that cold, too, can be a mortal threat – does this suggest that a kind of mental space has been carved out by Conrad Coldbrook, in perhaps the most unlikely of places? These hot and cold patterns will also be played out in the characters themselves, amidst names such as Summer and Spring Peters. Even the description of the reclone of Arabella, Ern’s once-upon-a-time wife, uses these terms: she is, according to Ern, “very, very hot” (265). We shall return to these temperature themes after a close look at the plot itself.
119
120## A Surface Re-enactment with Pertinent Comments
121
122As Ern eventually understands what happened, Conrad Coldbrook, Sr., was a minor executive who flitted from job to job before suddenly becoming an overnight success. He moved his family, consisting of a somewhat mentally troubled wife named Joanne Rebecca Carole, his son Conrad, Jr., nicknamed Cob, and his daughter Colette, two years younger, to the wealthy area of New Delphi. He zealously guarded the secrets of the top floor of his house, wherein his laboratory and two other locked doors were situated. Slightly over three years before the opening of the book, Conrad’s wife seems to have passed away, at which point Coldbrook hired human help in caring for the house. (Ern’s ruminations suggest that he himself might only have been recloned about three years before Colette checks him out, at about the time Joanne died). Senior was in the habit of leaving his family for long periods of time, and his son eventually became convinced that his father had died during one such extended absence. Cob hired a locksmith to break into his father’s safe, discovering emeralds, which he sold, and a book, Ern A. Smithe’s *Murder on Mars*, which he took to his sister (according to Colette’s later version of these events, without telling her about the emeralds, insisting that the book was the only thing to be found in the safe, given to her by her brother on the very day that he died).
123
124By the end of the novel, Ern surmises that Cob’s father eventually returned and was outraged at his son’s betrayal. The larger and stronger father could not forgive the intrusion into his secrets. Conrad, Sr., strangled Cob at the entry to his house even as Colette watched (though she initially denies being there). Supposedly, Cob planned to return the money from pawning the emeralds to his father. Ultimately, Ern assumes that Colette ransacked Cob’s bags for that money, then later poisoned her father. Before his death, Conrad, Sr., dismissed the living help which came on board after his wife died. Knowing that the central government in Niagara was interested in her father’s assets and how he had managed to accumulate it so quickly, Colette was determined to learn the secrets of the book left in her hands by her deceased brother, leading to the start of the novel on July 20th, when she approaches the reclone Ern A. Smithe at the Spice Grove Library. She is primarily interested in asking Ern how a secret might be concealed in a book and checks him out for ten days.
125
126At an idyllic waterfall setting, Colette tells Smithe’s reclone a very different version of events, which diverges even further as the book progresses: her father had passed away, and while the estate’s money had been split between her brother and herself, the house had been left to Cob. Her brother then gave half of the house to her and offered to buy it back. Alas, he was murdered in the foyer of his father’s house, and she was left to discover the mystery of Smithe’s book alone. According to Colette, the estate’s library was also ransacked, as she was later informed by a police officer. (Ern will eventually learn from one of the living house servants that Cob had been planning to sell the house.)
127
128In this opening, idyllic scene, Ern tells Colette that he daydreams of the wife he had for a short time when he was alive, the poet Arabella Lee. Conspicuously, Ern does not remember writing *Murder on Mars*, the book Colette has, until he reads a brief passage from it. He resolves to talk to the expert who opened the safe for her brother (an important event which is planned several times but never comes to fruition within the text.)
129
130They return to Colette’s apartment in Taos Towers, where she forbids Ern from entering her bedroom and the kitchen. He takes the book from her shaping bag, imploring her to silence. Unbeknownst to her, he throws it down a laundry chute. (Later, Ern supposes that being forbidden access to the kitchen and Colette’s bedroom is based on the presence of incriminating evidence, which might include the poison she used to kill her father.) Ern and Colette are interrupted by two men, who somehow bypass the security on her apartment. Colette says she only gave unlimited access to her brother Cob. The men, one of whom is the government agent Dane van Petten, as will become clear later, demand the book, claiming that her brother stole it from them. [The book seems, from the other information we have by the end of the novel, to have belonged to Conrad, Sr.; to say that Cob stole it from them is an interesting spin – it is a claim Colette’s father might have made. Near the end of the book, van Petten will also claim that the shorter man with him was his unnamed boss.] They assault Ern and Colette. When Ern awakens after rushing to Colette’s aid and being beaten unconscious, he is tied naked to a chair, along with his patroness. He manages to break the chair and retrieve a sharp knife from the kitchen to help free Colette.
131
132She chooses to ignore Ern’s entrance into the kitchen this time and tries to pressure him into revealing the book’s location. The reclone retrieves the book from the laundry before preparing to sleep in the living room, at her request. Ern falls asleep after reading from *Murder on Mars* and dreams of wrestling a multi-headed beast with many arms as a wormhole floods Mars with water. [We shall return to this dream imagery below; while it might cast light on the events of *A Borrowed Man*, this dream could also represent a type of Easter Egg: a doorway into an entirely different fictional universe in Wolfe’s corpus.]
133
134On the morning of July 21st, Ern and Colette go to the Coldbrook Mansion, outside the city of New Delphi. Colette indicates that the house is forty-three years old and that she was fourteen when they moved there. Relating her family history, Colette reveals that her mother was never a very social person, as someone who was stressed out by the presence of other people. Colette lands her small red car herself, and also reveals something about the novel’s setting and future job expectations: even though she is a teacher, her job is actually to motivate the students to learn from mechanized programs. Often, above and beyond her job description, she teaches students herself rather than relying on automation, just to show her wards that they can and should learn things for themselves.
135
136As they talk further, Ern asks if her house card also unlocks the hangar. Colette says she never considered it, as when she lived there the hangar was rarely locked. Her key works, and Ern first sees the black and yellow flitters he later learns are named Cat and Canary. They enter the mansion through the kitchen, and Colette shows him around the house, including a large dining room which seats, as she claims, up to twenty-two people. In the sunroom, Ern sees a picture of the family, noting that Cob is “oddly reflective of his father” (56). He also sees a family photo in which Colette and Cob are holding hands. [Later, Ern will describe Colette’s mother to two interrogators named Payne and Fish. He will then describe her as the smallest of the four, wearing a “Blue-and-white skimmer, dark blue scarf around her neck” in the photo (124). This might be an important color association.] They take the lift to the fourth floor, and Colette explains that her father disabled it when he was going to be gone for any length of time. Colette denies ever entering the locked doors on the fourth floor outside her father’s lab, assuming them to lead to suites.
137
138In their discussion, Colette describes herself as a good girl when she was younger, though she admits, “You men mature slowly; it rushes on us like a storm, and I wasn’t always good after it came. Can I tell you something about Cob?” (59) She reveals that during one of her father’s absences, her brother climbed up the exterior of the house to reach the fourth floor. She waited for him, “walking up and down and wondering if he’d be killed. Cob and I were very close” (60).
139
140After her father’s death, Colette wanted to explore the other rooms on the fourth floor, but Cob claimed that the key he had, given to him by the mortuary assistant dealing with her father’s body, only opened the lab door (61). [Given our understanding by the end that Cob preceded his father in death, where did this key come from? Is it fabricated? Was it in the safe?] Colette and Ern examine her father’s safe, and Ern sees two empty black metal drawers above it. Ern supposes, “If the card for this room was on your brother’s body, the people who killed him presumably have it now” (62). Colette also reveals that she and her brother split the cost of her father’s death.
141
142Next, Colette cries while discussing the inheritance and how fairly her brother treated her. When Ern notes that now she has everything, she responds, “I suppose so. I’m the only one left. Except that really we’re all family, aren’t we? Even you. All we humans have got to be related, however distantly. Humanity can’t have evolved twice, or at least I wouldn’t think so” (64). [Colette’s identification of Ern as family might reveal something about his potential nature, which we shall return to after this lengthy synopsis.]
143
144As they discuss her father’s files, Ern is surprised to learn that hacking still exists. They find some astrophysics journals as well, several authored by Dr. K. Justin Roglich of Birgenheier in Owenbright. [This could even suggest that Owenbright is in fact near Luxembourg or Germany, and that vast distances can be covered in a very short amount of time. The exact location of “New America” is never entirely clear.] Ern tells Colette to call Dr. Roglich and ask for a consultation, relying on the fact that her father, too, must have consulted him at one point.
145
146At this point, Ern also asks her to place an order for a print on demand copy of *Murder on Mars*: “Colette did as I had asked, watched by me. I was nervous and trying not to show it” (66). The site she consults does not believe that the book exists. As Ern instructs her to try an alternative search, he finds some receipts for uncut gems in an attempt “to keep myself from staring at Colette and making her nervous.” (67). [The tension surrounding the book might be indicative of a mystery which Ern is at least subconsciously aware of –  something he additionally attempts to keep from revealing fully to Colette. The doomed search for other copies of the book juxtaposed against the finding of receipts for uncut gems might also be thematically important. On the other hand, he might be nervous because he has used some sleight of hand to conceal the book at this point, or is planning to do so – a mere foreshadowing of a later plot point.]
147
148Ern concludes that the book must simply be an extremely rare one. [At least, this is what he tells Colette.] He turns to a discussion of her brother and her father’s deaths. Colette says that though there was a medical examination, there was no reason to suspect that her father had been murdered: he died from a burst blood vessel. Ern surmises that the people looking for the book could not have known about it before Conrad, Sr., died.
149
150At this point, Colette stresses that Cob was murdered almost three weeks after the funeral of her father. (Here, Ern supposes that he can imagine what Cob might have found in the house during that time – perhaps referring to the gems whose receipts he just found, though this is unclear.) They take their discussion outside to continue talking about the book. In a weed-choked garden, Ern enquires about the servants. While humans might manifest behavioral problems or steal, Colette says that “’Bots are sick half the time. Besides, they do crazy things and think they’re just fine. … When your human gets sick, the government pays. When your ‘bot gets sick, you pay” (70-1).
151
152Ern insists that they must make the people interested in his book show themselves. He also affirms that no matter how many or how few enemies they may have, the law is on their side. This distracts Colette and also has an effect upon Ern: “Colette had clearly thought of something or if I finished the thought, she didn’t hear it. To tell the truth I did not either” (73).
153
154[There are several moments in the text where Ern seems to be acting unconsciously – one of them involves springing to defend Colette when van Petten and the other intruder accost them in her apartment. These are the moments which we should note carefully. Indeed, right after this, Colette references that very event in her apartment.]
155
156She reveals that after Ern was knocked unconscious, the men at Taos Towers had threatened to torture them: “Pull out fingernails. Burn our feet” (74). She thinks that the younger of the two, Dane, is not as bad as the other one, considering that he might come to work for them if there was enough incentive. [The length of any pre-existing relationship between Dane and Colette is never firmly established, but this would suggest that they are probably already involved with one another.]
157
158The text skips ahead to a meeting with Dr. Roglich at his office on what might be the day of July 22nd. [While I will continue to give the likely dates, we should note that during Ern’s interrogation with Payne and Fish he reveals that he was with Colette for perhaps two and half days; it could very well be that this is actually July 23rd, and we are missing time between the action at the Coldbrook Estate and the meeting with Roglich in Owenbright. By the end of the story, we will be one day off from Ern’s account, and the discrepancy might first arise here.] Ern is surprised by the doctor’s strong hands, and notes that “Dr. Roglich seemed to be talking to the bookcase in the corner” (76). Roglich surmises that Colette’s father must be dead, though he denies knowing her brother Cob at all. [Colette repeats the story of Cob’s death in the hallway of their house and the subsequent rifling of person and suitcase. This is actually an interesting juxtaposition given the strength of Roglich’s hands and Cob’s strangulation.] Ern states that her father’s interests are being looked after by his executor, an attorney, though the assets will be turned over to Colette at the age of thirty. Roglich reveals that his initial meeting with Conrad, Sr., involved considerations of the nature of space. Roglich also brings up the Big Bang and its singular quality, wondering how, then, the outer limits of the universe might have come into being. He also introduces the idea of the conservation of space. As Roglich discusses borrowing space from somewhere else, he sweats profusely. [Ironically, such a spatial dislocation could create an icy coolness. As we have already mentioned, it is worth paying attention to the hot and cold imagery throughout the book. When Ern talks with Colette about the types of secrets that might be hidden in books, one of the methods he discusses includes heat sensitivity: “There are chemical formulations that will disappear into the paper when they dry, only to reappear if the paper is warmed. When it cools, the writing vanishes again” (14). We shall return to this idea later.] Ultimately, Roglich denies that such space-distorting technology could ever be created, though it is “theoretically feasible” (82). At this point, he asks Ern to bring a copy of a blue book from the shelf, cluing them into the surveillance equipment planted in the bookcase on the second shelf. Ern crushes it and takes the book, which is filled with equations. Roglich indicates that they can keep the book and describes the people who planted the bug: “The men sounded like the two who had tied us up. The third was a woman” (84).
159
160[It might be prudent to start thinking of this scene as somewhat symbolic, given the blue cover of the book, sitting as it is on the second shelf. Colette’s mother will become associated with blue, but she is not the only character in the book who is described wearing that color. However, we should still pay attention to the recurrence of blue throughout the text, as well as the unfortunate grouping of two men and one women. Senior, Cob, and Colette formed one such group, as will Ern, Georges, and Mahala. However, the identity of the woman accompanying Dane van Petten and, presumably, his boss, remains unclear. Possibilities include the small “man” we will soon meet named Chick Bantz, Colette herself, or, if we want to go all-in on conspiracy theories, even her supposedly dead mother.]
161
162Ern is interested in staying the night there in the hopes of giving their mysterious foes an opportunity to break into Colette’s father’s house. They take a hovercab to a hotel and then shop for more clothes for Ern. Later, after Ern showers and prepares for dinner, he is surprised to find that Colette has vanished from the hotel. When he finally enters her room, he finds signs of a struggle and a rumpled bed.
163
164The police sim he contacts tells him that a family member may report Colette missing after twenty-four hours has passed. The simulation is not sure if that time begins when she disappears, when it is noticed, or when the police are contacted: “You ought to have tried sooner. ... Only I’m not sure this counts, because of you being a reclone and not a family member.” Ern says that her father, mother, and brother are all dead, and the sim replies, “That doesn’t matter, any of them will do” (87).
165
166[While this seems asinine, perhaps one or all of those people actually is capable of acting even after “death” within the parameters of the novel.] Ern empties Colette’s shaping bag and takes its contents, then makes his way to the Owenbright Library. (We learn that Ern’s shelf at Spice Grove was on the second level, though it was labeled a three, numbered from the top down – here, he is given a topmost shelf to stay the night.) Ern notes that “Once, as if I were dreaming, I heard what seemed like a familiar voice” (89).
167
168The next morning, (the 23rd or 24th), a woman whose voice Smithe fails to recognize calls to him as he eats breakfast, and soon enough he and a reclone of the poet Arabella Lee, his ex-wife, are kissing. Almost immediately, she declares Ern to be “the world’s most irritating man” (91). As he attempts to flatter her, she resentfully mentions some chocolates he once brought her. She says they ruined her diet, causing her to gain “eight kilos” (91). She goes on to describe the food it led her to, including saltwater taffy, before asking if Ern could buy her more chocolate in the library. [This taffy, in a seascape decorated box, was covered in red, blue, and green wrappers. These colors also seem to have some symbolic significance as the text progresses.] Eventually, amidst talk of being checked out and of food, Arabella asks, “Will we ever be free?” (93)
169
170Soon, she begins to cry over the prospect of being burnt to death. When they discuss the possibility of fighting against their fate, Arabella thinks that would help replace her despondence with madness, prompting her to think of the John Dryden quote, “Great wit is unto madness near allied” (94). Ern mistakenly identifies the author as Shakespeare, and tries to reassure her that she will be checked out or purchased before she is burnt. Eventually, he suggests that they argue on his shelf rather than in public. She asks if he can help her escape, but soon enough walks away: “I know what you want, Ern. Our divorce is final, and you’re not going to get it” (96).
171
172Ern declares that he only wants her love. Later, he reviews from his shelf how he had gone wrong in their interaction. Shortly afterwards, a young blond person, “quite a bit smaller than most men, dressed in a faded blue chore smock that did not even come close to going with his culottes and pointed boots,” comes calling for Ern (96). [While there is some ambiguity in the term culottes, in the modern sense this usually refers to a female article of clothing. We should also note that this character is associated with the color blue.] The small “man” is Chick Bantz, who offers Ern hot chocolate [which might even call back to Ern’s interaction with Arabella right before this, and the resentment his chocolates caused – though this chocolate is *hot*.] Something in their discussion on the library patio about the forbidden nature of buying reclones food in the library prompts Ern to think of “the name of the boy Dr. Johnson had talked about, the young genius who had choked to death on a sweet roll. It would not come, and that boy had lived hundreds of years too early for recloning anyway” (97). [We shall return to this detail below, for though on the surface it is invoked by considering the dangers of food, in reality, the “young genius” Johnson talked about is most probably the young forger Thomas Chatterton, who poisoned himself. This allusion might have some very real thematic implications for both *Murder on Mars*, Chick Bantz, and Ern himself.] Chick offers Ern three hundred creds and also buys Ern a sandwich, offering him a drink from his flask: “Swan-n-Sweetheart five star,” which he pours into Ern’s hot chocolate (98). [Given the name “Cob” and its relationship to swans, and Arabella’s statement that the chocolate Ern gave her “[g]reased the skid to hell,” we shall be returning to the symbolic implication of this exchange later. Should we equate Chick with Chatterton, the suicidal master forger? His name also seems to be, through its bird connotation, related to Cob’s swan-like nickname. We will later learn that Joanne Rebecca Carole, Colette’s mother, was potentially suicidal. On rereads, Swan-n-Sweetheart should also prompt the recollection that Cob has an unnamed fiancée: where is she in all of this?]
173
174Chick proposes that Ern be freed from the library. When Ern insists that he cannot be checked out from a library he does not belong to, Chick reveals he has a gun. Ern says that even though he has a card that would serve to open the doors of his library, it will not work for Owenbright. [This talk, too, might be somehow pertinent to the exploration of one of the biggest mysteries in the text – how Ern exits the door, ostensibly on another world, to the fourth floor of the Coldbrook mansion later in the story.] Despite the growing tension, Chick gives Ern another sandwich and says that the “tall man” sent him to retrieve Ern (100). [This is of course Dane ven Petten, but any description of a tall man also invokes imagery of Conrad, Sr.] Ern’s visitor leaves abruptly, and the reclone gives the third and final sandwich away to a heavyset woman. He goes to observe Arabella, whose hand is twitching for a pencil: “Finding there wasn’t any, she came to, shrugged, and returned to her silent stare into space. It would be super cool, I thought, to move that space of hers into some museum; but I had no idea how to do it” (101). She tells him that there is a ‘bot looking for him. [The possibility that moved space might involve the thoughts of individuals rather than pure physical space should certainly be entertained after we are introduced to Ern’s conscious and Arabella’s unconscious desires in this scene. In addition, the idea of moving her thoughts into space is branded as “super cool” – another invocation of hot and cold. At the very end of the novel, after Ern brings another copy of Arabella to Colette’s apartment, Colette, too, can be seen staring off into space in just such a fashion. Is this fugue contagious, like a flu? This entire scene seems highly symbolic, and the eventual presence of three Arabella reclones in the narrative, one of whom is left with Colette, parallels the fate of the sandwiches in this scene – the fact that Chick bought the sandwiches might also tell us something about why three copies of an obscure and unpopular poet exist, given his name’s resonance with Cob.]
175
176Ern returns to Spice Grove in a truck, and it departs Owenbright at about three o’clock. It stops for dinner several hours later. Ern offers to pay for the driver’s meal if he can sit in front like a human being. He stays the night in the truck. They continue the next day (the 24th or the 25th), where they stop at a small town to drop books off at a local library. When Ern asks why they don’t simply mail the books, the driver says, “They’d lose too many. Most books, nobody’s got new copies. Either they never been scanned, or the scans are lost. You pay through the nose if you can find a copy for sale, too” (104). The driver also denies the feasibility of scanning everything because of its time and cost. He also says, “if one guy could control all them scans, he’d have a lock. Pretty soon, nobody’d know anything he didn’t want ‘em to know. You think that one over” (105).
177
178On the trip, Ern thinks of Colette’s problem and her plans. “[S]he said she was going to get her mother recloned. What about her father? He had been the financial genius, right? Alive again, he could make her a lot more money. After I had thought that over, I decided that she figured she could not control him, not even if he was a reclone and did not count” (105). He also notes that Colette does not seem consistent in discussing the amount of time that passed between the death of her father and her brother. Suspicions rising, Ern wonders why Colette believes that the tall man who entered her apartment might not be so bad. Even though both he and Colette were stripped, she did not seem to be beaten. “The more I thought about it the surer I got that there was something funny going on, but I could not even guess what it was” (106). Finally, he ponders the “little guy” who gave him so much money. “if he was one of the gang, the gang made even less sense than I had thought. If he was not, what was he up to?” (107) [Roglich clearly implied a woman was working with the two men, but he did not seem to implicate Colette – unless his uncertainty on how to proceed in front of her prompted his nervous stuttering.] 
179
180Near lunch time, the vehicle arrives at a larger university library. There are plenty of books to unload. When they return after a break for lunch, [another copy of] Arabella Lee, headed out on interlibrary loan, is sitting beside the loaded book carts waiting for them. This brings some strife into the equation: “When we had finished and were ready to go, where we would sit started a big argument” (109). Eventually, Ern makes a deal with the driver that Arabella can sit on Ern’s lap, though she must leave at Inspiration Popular Learning Center and the two of them must sleep in the truck.
181
182[At this point, I would like to make a call back to a detail which I elided at the start of this summary. When Ern first reads from *Murder on Mars*, it is the following words that trigger his memories of writing the book:
183
184>*Eridean had called them the sewers, but they were enormously larger and more varied than the term implied, tunnels and cellars and subcellars and worse, far beneath the city. There were animals in them, he knew. Animals, men more hostile and more fell than any beast, and plants that throve without the sun, pale growths that feasted upon the living and the dead. Yet what first Apolean met was none of these, but a woman.* (32)
185
186The name Eridean can mean “of Eris” – the name of the Greek goddess of strife. While it is not an exact match, Apolean might also be derived from the god Apollo’s name. While these cellars and subcellars do not seem to closely match anything in the text save perhaps the mine in which the emeralds might be harvested later in the novel, perhaps the imagery also serves as a metaphor for the subconscious and for the current condition of humanity. When Ern reads these words, the following occurs: “Talking mostly to myself, I said, ‘I remember it now’” (32). Only then does he recall *Murder on Mars*. While there are multiple females who might serve as representatives of Eris and discord, Arabella might certainly be one of them, given the explosive and capricious nature of Ern’s interactions with her.]
187
188Ern considers asking Arabella why she left him, but eventually concludes she divorced him for a very particular reason:
189
190 >Mysteries sell and poetry does not, or hardly ever. Not even great poetry. My editor was always after me for another book, another Red Searcher story or another Mrs. Jacoby story; but Arabella had to go from publisher to publisher and finally she just put her books out on the internet and let it go at that – you could download them if you wanted to, only there were not any hard copies (112).
191
192Eventually, Ern says that they are now living in “full humanity’s retirement” (112). Despite all that humans have overcome and all of the cities that they have built, stretching human dominion out over and over again, eventually people “reached their limits [and] found that they were old” (114).
193
194Midmorning the next day (July 25th or 26th), they reach Arabella’s destination. Ern is disappointed in the hope that there will be a copy of him there to take care of her, and they kiss goodbye. Arriving at Spice Grove at closing time, Ern estimates that the distance from Inspiration to his library is approximately four hundred and fifty kilometers. Upon his arrival, Ern learns that two patrons are waiting to check him out. After cleaning up, Ern asks other library resources about who might be interested in him, and learns from a cookbook author that a tall man in a blue or green uniform and a shorter man in dark clothes had been at the library together. “The small one sounded like he might be the guy who had given me money. He might also have been any of a million other guys” (116).
195
196The next morning (the 26th or the 27th), a bot wakes Ern for breakfast, and, by ten or ten thirty, two large men come for him, though “Neither of them was tall and neither was short” (118). [At this point, Ern reveals that he is writing on some device which he does not know how to back up on, and also says that he is not truly writing: “[W]hich my brain is blocked on. (Or not all of it is. Only some of it.)” (118). He is able to use a keyboard in the fashion in which he thinks. [The idea that parts of Ern’s brain are not blocked is hard to ignore and suggests that he is more than just a reclone of Ern A. Smithe.]
197
198The first man introduces himself: “Pain’s my name. Wonderful to meet you, Mr. Smithe. I listened to your disks years and years back, all I could find. Meeting you now is a great, great pleasure” (119). [Later, Ern notes that he discovers the name is actually spelled Payne, and that the quieter of the two is named “Fish, or maybe Fisher. Something like that” (119). This is the best evidence for Ern Smithe’s reality as an established writer, though, oddly, Payne and Fish do not appear in the glossary of characters.]
199
200The two take Ern to a “safe house” and then Fish suggests that they handcuff him to prevent escape. They threatened to take Ern as evidence until the library allowed them to check him out. Inside, Ern notes that the soundproof room with double panes features “navy blue drapes over all the windows” (121). Ern is concerned that they will “break one of my fingers or maybe burn my feet” (121). Fish asks if they are going to tie him to the chair, but Payne merely invites him to sit in it.
201
202They ask him about his connection to the Coldbrook family. Ern responds:
203
204>“I don’t really have any connection to the family as such. Colette Coldbrook checked me out, and she’s the only member of the family I’ve ever met.” I hesitated, wondering how much Payne really knew. “As I understand it, all the other members of her family are deceased.” (122)
205
206[Once again, there is a caginess around the claim that the rest of the family members are dead, though it might also surround the idea that Colette is the only family member he has met – more on this below.]
207
208When Ern asks them a question, he is beaten. They tell him to talk more about the Coldbrooks. Payne is interested in the mother and what Ern knows of her. Ern says, “Nothing, beyond the fact that she’s dead. At least Colette said she was” (123). After some thought, Ern realizes that he saw her picture. He attempts to describe her: 
209
210>“She was the smallest of the four, although I doubt that she was actually as short as she appeared. At the time the picture was taken, I would say that she was an attractive woman just entering middle age. Seventy, perhaps. Her clothes looked a bit old-fashioned, I thought, though of course the picture had probably been taken several years ago. Blue-and-white skimmer, dark blue scarf about her neck. … Dark [hair], I’m sure. It appeared jet black in the picture. It may not have been, but it was certainly quite dark. Of course women’s hair colors change with the wind.” (124) 
211
212[Given the ambiguous gender of the blond Chick Bantz, this detail about height and fickle hair color might be applicable. This description associates the color blue with Colette’s mother, though the tall man looking for Ern at the library might also have been wearing blue. As we have mentioned, another reference to blue involves the book of equations pulled from Roglich’s office shelf – which, conspicuously, seems to have multiple copies. If we were going to equate the books in the novel with reclones, then perhaps the unique *Murder on Mars* might map to Ern, while the blue book of equations, with multiple copies, would fit Arabella. In this interrogation, the interest of Payne and Fish in Colette’s mother, along with the qualifier, “At least Colette said she was [dead],” serves to cast some doubt on the finality of Joanne Rebecca Carole’s fate. However, Chick Bantz never seems to act as anything more than a somewhat cooperative thug throughout the novel, for all the ambiguous imagery surrounding his gender identity.]
213
214Ern describes Conrad, Sr., as very tall and thin: “Considerably taller than his son and daughter, although they both looked tall, and Colette is certainly tall for a woman. I would say that he was at least a head and a half taller than his wife. He had broad shoulders and large hands” (125). Ern also emends the statement that Conrad was the only family member touching the others, with a hand on his wife and the other on his son, when he recalls that Colette and her brother were holding hands. Payne says that Conrad, Sr., was bald. Ern describes Cob as dark haired and handsome, resembling his mother more and not as tall or thin as his father. Ern claims that he and Colette were together for two and a half days, “perhaps” (126). [This would suggest that he and Colette may have been separated on the 23rd of July.]
215
216Payne proceeds to ask if Ern saw Colette get dressed, the color of her eyes (violet), and if she was wearing tinted contacts. “I thought about that one; it felt wrong, but it was something I knew little or nothing about. ‘I suppose so. I don’t believe she was’” (127). They also ask if she wore makeup or false eye-lashes. [This presents the possibility that the woman Ern knows as Colette might not actually be her, though there is no ready mechanism to account for such a switch. Given the red and blue imagery, possibly allied to the hot and cold motifs in the text, violet eyes could indicate a kind of mixing of red and blue. The first time Ern described Colette at the start of the book, he said that she had “coal black hair, dream-deep blue eyes, and that paper white skin that burns in five or ten minutes if it is not protected from the sun” (11).]
217
218Fish suggests that they should question Ern about the Coldbrook house. Payne insists, “We don’t have [Colette] at all. Someone does, and I think I know who. But it’s not our department – not even close. Does she like you?” (128)
219
220Ern says that she might think of him as a friend, or even as she would feel about a good book or a dog. Payne says that Cob was “Choked to death by somebody with a lot bigger, stronger hands than [Colette’s] got. She’ll get what would have been his half of the old man’s money; but that’s held up, and it’s going to keep right on being held up until the brother’s murder’s solved. Did you know about that?” (129) [This would seem to be the one portion of the text outside of Colette which could suggest that the father died before Cob, as Payne and Fish seem to assume that he would have received some of the “old man’s” money – an assertion which makes little sense if it was common knowledge that he died before his father. So far, the men with strong hands we have met include Conrad, Sr., and Dr. Roglich.]
221
222Payne says, “Nobody profits by the crime until we find out who committed the crime. Did you ever meet the father? … I didn’t know him either. … Now I wish I had. Somebody said once that he could pull gold out of the air” (129).
223
224Payne admits that Conrad, Sr., was a financial genius:
225
226>“It seemed like everything he touched made money. Naturally the trick was that he knew which ones to touch. Only where’d he get all his capital to start with? I don’t suppose you know.”
227
228>I did not want to tell any more lies than I had to, so I said, “Someone must know.” (130)
229
230[It is unclear how Ern might be tempted to lie at this point, given what he knows about Conrad, Sr. It might be time to consider that there is a strong relationship, somehow, between Conrad, Sr., and Ern. Later, we will learn that Sr. had access to an application for forging IDs – good enough to fool the police. Whether he achieved his fortune through fraud or through some other forgery remains frustratingly unclear, but if Ern is tempted to lie here, perhaps Conrad’s money actually has something to do with him. Colette even suggests that her father might have been blackmailing someone.]
231
232Payne eventually reveals: “We want to find out about the Coldbrooks and about Colette especially. The rest are dead issues, see? She’s still alive, or we hope she is. What did she want with you?” (131)
233
234Ern tells them about *Murder on Mars*, and Payne asks Fish to contact headquarters to get a copy for them. At this point, Ern assumes that they must be police, though Payne’s responses are somewhat ambiguous before admitting, “You got it” (132). He looks around to make sure his partner is out of earshot, and tells Ern that Colette had enough cash to work as a school teacher in Spice Grove but to live in upscale Taos Towers. According to what he tells Ern, Colette’s disappearance is a gigantic embarrassment, and Ern’s help in finding her would be appreciated. Ern describes the garden meeting and the book. When Ern mentions the A-1 status of the intruders at Taos Towers, Payne suggests that they were either special guests or had a warrant. Eventually, Ern asserts that the great mystery in the case is not the killer of Colette’s brother but the identity of her kidnapper. [Is this a metatextual assertion to readers as well? If Colette was never reported as missing, the interest of Payne and Fish in the case seems prescient.] Payne fixates on the possibility of heroic recognition in recovering Colette, given her social status. At this point, Fish returns and insists that there is no trace of the book *Murder on Mars* and that Ern has been stringing them along. Ern asks for creds to take a bus to New Delphi and retrieve the book, since the men cannot leave their jurisdiction.
235
236“My offer was refused, as I knew it would be. The refusal was followed by blows and burns, and a great many more questions, few of which I could answer in a way that satisfied my questioners” (135).
237
238[This interrogation seems oddly “separated” from the rest of the book, as Payne and Fish do not obviously re-enter the text afterwards. However, these men know about Colette’s disappearance before a relative makes a formal complaint that “counts” to the police. Perhaps, because of the questions they ask about Colette and the possibility that she is in disguise, when Ern suggests that the greatest mystery actually involves the identity of Colette’s kidnapper, we might begin to consider the possibility that the Colette he has met might not actually be the original Colette. The dream which he is about to have reinforces the idea that something violent might have happened to her.]
239
240Ern is then locked in a windowless room and falls asleep, at which point he dreams of a book: when he pulls it off the shelf, Arabella steps out of it. “She kissed me, and we were on a beach. The little waves came up and washed our feet; and they were warm, really nice and warm. I put my arms around Arabella, and she was warm, too” (136). He places her back in the book, between palm trees. The dream continues:
241
242>“I got another book and opened that one, and Colette came out. She told me something I could not remember when I woke up, and I tried to make her go back into her book, but she kept struggling and struggling, sticking out arms and legs so I couldn’t close it properly” (136).
243
244[These dreams, too, contrast hot and cold in the form of Arabella and Colette Coldbrook. Previously, Ern felt the cooling effect on his feet with Colette; here, Arabella’s warmth is emphasized. However, what is the significance of Colette being thrust back into a book, and what might she be trying to tell Ern?]
245
246He awakens after midnight, when the room is still dark. Ern kicks through the wall across from the bed and emerges into another bedroom before escaping from the kitchen. Ern resolves to go to the bus station and make an attempt to save Colette: “Now it was Puss in Boots time, and Colette was the Marquis of Carabas” (140). [The cars at the Coldbrook Estate are called Cat and Canary, and here Ern imagines being Puss in Boots. Of course, in the fairy tale, Puss helps establish the fraudulent identity of the Marquis of Carabas, who is actually a mere commoner. One of the most famous moments in that story involves Puss’s plan to array his master in fine clothes: he pretends that the Marquis’s finery has been stolen as he bathes in a river. When the king and his daughter pass, the cat begs them to help his naked master; the plot succeeds in causing the princess to fall for the impersonator. Colette, too, might not be what she at first appears to be.] Ern has a hunch that she is in New Delphi. At the bus station in the early hours of July 27th or 28th, Ern passes the time casually observing the strange pornography on display before losing interest in trying to figure out which performers were reclones. He gets a seat right behind the driver when the bus begins boarding. When it finally takes off, stragglers are still trying to board it. Whether they are clean or dirty, the people on board seem particularly shabby and downtrodden.
247
248On the bus, he hears someone singing some suggestive lyrics:
249
250“*Where has she gone, and why should I care? A woman’s a snake, a woman’s a snare; today it’s a kiss, and come into my bed; tomorrow’s a hiss, and you’re better off dead. Where has she gone?*” (144)
251
252[By the end of the book, unfortunately, there are several possible female “snares,” including Colette, her mother, Cob’s seemingly invisible fiancée, and perhaps even the maid Judy Peters and her daughters, introduced to the house after the death of Mr. Coldbrook’s wife. Chick Bantz can’t even be ruled out. In addition, there is an unresolved plot detail that is about to be sprung upon readers: where does Colette disappear to when Ern returns to Coldbrook Estate?]
253
254Ern watches a romantic comedy on the bus, with a plot which might have some application to the novel:
255
256>“One was a writer and one was an editor, only neither of them ever seemed to do any work. Pretty soon I caught on to the ending. The editor would confess he was really a woman in disguise and the writer would confess she was really a man in disguise. Did Shakespeare write one like that? If he did not, he should have – the girls in his plays are always pretending to be boys.” (144)
257
258[Given the ambiguous gender of Chick Bantz, this interlude might still apply to some of the other characters in the text. Of course, our most prominent writer figure is Ern, though there seems to be little to suggest that a woman might be lurking inside him, unless the trigger which might awaken another portion inside of him, reading *Murder on Mars*, is abbreviated as “MOM.” We should note that Colette talks about the experience of looking into the thoughts of another person at the start of the book.]
259
260On a stop at Rapid Rivers, Ern gets some food, which he shares with the passengers behind him, a medium-sized middle-aged man calling himself Georges Fevre and his partner, who turns out to be the mute Mahala Levy. While Ern is interested in them, he limits the conversation, as he fears they will soon realize he is a reclone. At about two in the afternoon, the bus stops at Hapigarden, and when Ern returns to his seat a man with a beat-up face has taken it. After asking for his seat back and being ignored, Ern beats the man, even kicking him after he is unconscious: “After that I pulled him out of my seat and kicked his head half a dozen times just because I felt like it” (148). Ern deposits the man in the back of the bus, but no one seems particularly fazed by the violence.
261
262Georges and Mahala are also getting off at New Delphi, and it is raining by the time they arrive. Suddenly, though he did not hesitate to tell Ern that Mahala was mute, Georges is worried about revealing her ability to sign in public. Ern decides that perhaps Georges, with his valid license, can drive them. Mahala is concerned that she will be incarcerated for her disability, and Ern promises that she will not be. He manages to get a van from the shelter to take them to the Coldbrook residence. When they arrive, Ern tells his new allies that he has a card (which the text indicates is from Colette’s shaping bag). Upon entering the house, he hears Colette’s voice, followed by a scream.
263
264[Here is another of the great mysteries of the novel: where does Colette go at this point in time, so that no one can find her? Was his dream of Colette being shoved into a book applicable to this disappearance?]
265
266They search, and the card fails to open two doors on the fourth floor, which resist every forceful method Georges and Ern employ. Georges believes that whoever took Colette must have heard them approach and rushed out the back door with her, with the size of the house preventing them from hearing the start of the ground car. Mahala thinks that they might be hiding in the hangar. They discover a locked car out back. In the barn, five bots are sitting around. None of them are aware that there might have been intruders in the house. The housemaid acknowledges that Colette was in the house, however, and that they were instructed to wait in the barn until they were summoned.
267
268The group returns to the house with the housemaid. The four gardener bots are instructed to search the property. Because of the car out back, Ern concludes that Colette and whoever is with her might still be in the house. During their conversation, Georges reveals that he knows something about stealing cars. [While it is never clear that the knowledge of car locks Georges has extends to other areas, it should be noted that another element missing from the text involves the locksmith who opened Colette’s father’s safe: given all of the time Ern thinks about contacting him, does he truly never factor in the story?]
269
270The housemaid says that she was purchased by Conrad, Sr., shortly before the death of his son. When Ern asks why Conrad did not have human servants, an interesting exchange occurs:
271
272>“My programming cautions against repeating anything I merely overhear, sir. However, Mr. Coldbrook, Senior, is no more.”
273
274>“That’s correct.” I made it as firm as I could. “He is dead, and I would like to know exactly what it was you overheard.” (162)
275
276[Once again, Ern seems to waffle in insisting that Conrad, Sr., is dead, forcing himself to state it firmly.]
277
278Eventually, Ern gets the maid to state that Conrad, Sr., cautioned Colette not to speak of the death of Cob. The maid saw the body, and there was no trace of blood. She was instructed to clean the floor by Cob’s father. According to the maid, she informed Cooldbrook that his son had returned to the house and was lying in the front hall, after which point, “He had me summon an ambulance” (164).
279
280When Georges says that he wants more soup, the maid asks, “Shall I leave this gentleman to serve you sir?” (165) Ern dismisses the bot. He then has Mahala attempt to verify some of Colette’s earlier story and learns that Merciful Maids, who Colette claimed cleaned up the house after her brother’s death, does not exist. Mahala manages to get a hold of Bettina Johns, Colette’s friend, who says that at the time of Cob’s death the family had servants who could do the cleaning. Through the computer interface, Mahala is able to speak with a variety of voices. [It seems as if the housemaid is treating Ern deferentially here, which is surprising, unless he is somehow more than a reclone.]
281
282Ern retreats to a guest room on the third floor alone and begins to investigate his new comrades. He finds that Mahala had been institutionalized for “hysterical paralysis of allocution” and escaped (167). He then attempts to pin down Georges identity in what is the most unbelievable scene in all of Wolfe’s corpus. After ruling out the various Georges Fevres in the database, he concludes:
283
284>Whatever my guy’s real name was, Georges Fevre was not it. So maybe George F-? There would be hundreds of those, maybe thousands. I played around with it anyway, and what he was doing before. Suppose I just saw him coming down the street? Executive? Lawyer? Both wrong, but – cop! How about George Franklin, police?
285
286>Bang! There he was, good picture, full face, uniform, bars on his shoulders. Captain George G. Franklin of the High Plains Police. Found not guilty but dismissed from the force anyhow. Divorced shortly afterward. Present address unknown. (169)
287
288[This seems the most incredible and unlikely intuitive conclusion of all time: to successfully determine both the occupation and name of Georges *a priori*, given a database filled with over a hundred Georges Fevres, defies reason. What is going on here? In some corner of Ern’s mind, did he already know Georges?]
289
290When Ern wakes up on July 28th (or, more likely, the 29th), he resolves to climb the building to attempt to reach the rooms on the fourth floor. He slides inside a fourth-floor corner window easily, and finds it full of equipment, housing a potentially radioactive reactor. He exits through the window, shaken, and comes to another one. Inside, he perceives a jungle and a large black hole which he supposes is an animal’s den. Seeing a door standing in the jungle, without a wall around it, convinces him to enter the room, breathing “magical air full of water” (172). He experiences almost nauseating stress as he enters. From the forest setting, Ern can no longer see the window. He opens the door and finds himself on the fourth-floor landing. He considers how to leave the door unlocked, before a thought strikes him:
291
292>If I did it, it would mean that anybody else who came up here and tried that door could just open it and walk into the jungle. As if that was not bad enough, he might even leave the door standing open behind him, probably because he would be afraid it might lock if he closed it. (173)
293
294Fearing that whatever is in the jungle might enter the house, Ern decides to shut the door behind him. He runs into Georges as he descends, who tells him that Mahala has made breakfast in the sunroom. Ern enters a room he assumes to be Cob’s and picks a clean garment after he shaves: “a blue one with green sleeves” (174). [It should be noted that the tall man who was looking for Ern at the library was wearing blue or green. Now is also a good time to reiterate that without *Murder on Mars*, which Ern stashed away before meeting with Roglich, though it is not presented overtly in text, he should not have been able to leave through the jungle door – unless he had another card that functioned to unlock it, or someone had recently passed through it, given the locking mechanism Ern will soon discover through trial and error. We should remember that when Colette first met Ern, the first words she said to him were “You might be the card that opens the book for me” (11). In the final chapter of the book, we shall learn that the code which unlocks the cars in the hangar is based off of a name: CONC – Con(rad) C(oldbrook). Can merely being an aspect of Conrad Coldbrook open certain doors?]]
295
296Georges is curious about what Ern has been doing in his bare feet, but Ern plays coy. When asked about small nuclear reactors, Georges says he knows, “Enough to build one, maybe. Not enough to improve what we’ve apparently got” (176). When Georges left university, he used to repair them. He describes the manner in which one might explode:
297
298>”When one goes out of control – somebody’s got to disable several safety devices for this to happen – it heats up, getting hotter and hotter. Steam pressure builds. There’s a relief valve, of course, but for an explosion we’ve got to assume that valve’s failed somehow. Meantime, the boiler’s weakened by all that heat coming off the reactor, so you get a steam explosion.” (177)
299
300[This, too, could be another variation on the “heating” factors poised against the “cooling factors in the book.]
301
302Ern says that they must find a card to open the doors upstairs. They discuss how hotels code and wipe cards and speculate whether Conrad, Sr., might have done something similar to his own cards. [This might also be a metaphor for coding other things: “A strong field wipes, a varying field recodes. They don’t need a backup card because they can code any card they’ve wiped to open that door” (178). [Might Ern, with his library card or with the card he took from Colette’s shaping bag, have had a card for exiting the strange room without having one that could serve to open it?]
303
304Besides the card he assumes was on Colette’s father when he died, Ern is interested in looking for any weapons Conrad might have had. Ern says that he is going to search the library, and Georges replies, “Hollowing out a book is an old, old trick. … You just cut the center out of a lot of pages. If it’s a big book you might easily put a missile pistol in there. Are you sure he had physical books? You don’t see those much anymore” (180).
305
306[This might be a metaphor for what has happened to Ern, too – hollowed out and filled with something else.]
307
308As he searches the library, Ern realizes, “That second card *was* hidden in the library, exactly like I had thought it might be. Only I was the one who had hidden it there” (180). He retrieves *Murder on Mars* from where he stashed it. (His narrative is very vague about the moments when he hides the book). [If there is a fragment of Conrad, Sr., within Ern somehow, then perhaps this, too, is another sentence with a double meaning, though the library hiding the key would be in Spice Grove or New Delhi rather than Conrad’s personal library.]
309
310When he rejoins Mahala and Georges, Ern asks her to look for ads for domestic servants. He recalls that “Colette had mentioned emeralds when she told me about her brother bringing her the book” (181). [This is a very perceptive moment for Ern, and an oddly sloppy assertion from Colette.]
311
312Despite second guessing himself, Ern takes Georges and Mahala up to the door and attempts to open it, waving the book in front of it:
313
314>First the back. Something clicked, but the door would not open. Then the spine, which got me nothing. Then the front cover.
315
316>That brought another soft click, but I could not be sure I had not imagined it. I felt like throwing myself against that steel door hard enough to break my shoulder, but I shoved down the handle and gave the door a good hard push instead. (182)
317
318The door opens and Georges and Mahala follow him into the strange world beyond it. He invites them to look around, then goes up to the cave entrance (wondering if Cob’s pants and shoes would fit him.) [Here, Ern asserts that the sky is blue there because of water vapor, though this may not be the technical truth for our own atmosphere. A “Coldbrook” would also be associated with water by virtue of their name – and at least a few of them with the color blue as well.]
319
320Ern says that they are on “an Earth-type planet of another star system” (183). He claims that the door will lead here “as long as the circuitry that connects our world with this one runs” (184). He even speculates with some certainty that “The people who kidnapped Colette brought her here. I know that, because I know it was she whom we heard speak, then scream, when I opened the door. While she was here, she may have left some sort of note – some clue that might tell us where they were taking her. Did you find anything like that?” (184) Ern tells them that the book was supposed to be the only thing found in her father’s safe, but he does not necessarily believe Colette’s story. Once again, he resolves to find the person who opened the safe, to “ask him or her what was in it when it was opened” (185). He also hopes to find the housekeeper who once worked for the Coldbrooks. He discusses how Conrad, Sr., might have made his money, speculating that the investment tip sheets might have brought in a fortune with little overhead. He also says, “I wish I knew whether he quit those jobs or resigned” (187). Mahala offers to find some of the men that worked with Conrad. Ern notes that Georges seems to know a lot about these tip sheets. “I used to subscribe to a couple. This was back when” (187).
321
322Georges also offers one way that Mr. Coldbrook could have gotten subscribers: “If he was a big investor – we’re talking millions – sure. If he had the rep that would do it. Want to tell me what’s up?”
323
324Ern responds, “It’s still too nebulous. I think I’m getting closer, but … no. Not yet, and perhaps not ever. I’m about finished” (187).
325
326[This entire scene is truly frustrating in the text’s reluctance to deliver on any of its promises: Ern never finds the locksmith, never talks to anyone who once worked with Conrad, Sr., and nothing ever comes, overtly, of Georges’s knowledge of tip sheets or what exactly Ern was getting at with this “nebulous” line of speculation. However, it spends a lot of time speculating on how Conrad initially made his money. Ern is certain that Colette and her “captors” have gone into the room to the world they are now speaking on, but this is never corroborated by later details in the text – unless, of course, these truths are somehow “absolutely” true without being literally true as Ern intends them. Is the Colette he knows the Colette who once entered the strange room? Could Georges have been involved with Conrad’s tip sheets? Is he in some way the locksmith, given his familiarity with how to get into locked cars? Why did he lose his police job, if he truly did? Did Conrad, Sr., or Joanne Rebecca Carole actually make their money by writing mystery novels under the assumed name of Ern A. Smithe and pass them off as “old” works, as the historical Chatterton did? Was Conrad, Sr., blackmailing someone, as Colette suggested, and was it Roglich?]
327
328Ern and his friends determine that they are on an island, and soon they hear a monotonous drumming sound. They smell smoke as they go to investigate, and discover living beings: “Except for their tails, faces, and fangs, they looked more like people than I would have expected, but they must have been forty or fifty centimeters over two meters tall, with arms, legs, and necks not much bigger than broomsticks” (190).
329
330Thinking that the creatures are performing some inscrutable ceremony, Ern also considers that they must have seen Colette’s father:
331
332>Maybe that had something to do with his being gone so long that his kids had thought he was probably dead. That had been a mistake; he was really off doing something that had taken him quite a while. That mistake may have been at the root of all the problems. I thought of that, too. (191)
333
334Ern also believes that the creatures must not live on the island, which might be a sacred space. Soon, they notice Ern, Georges, and Mahala, and spring to attack, one of them throwing a spear. They flee back to the door, and Ern assumes that he must have waved the book at it, for it opens at Georges’s touch. Because it seems to be a matter of some inconsistency, it is worth reproducing at length exactly what Ern says about the locking mechanism:
335
336>(Right here I would like to stop and explain how the door worked; it took me a while to work it out, but there was nothing complicated about it. Each side had its own locking mechanism. The front, facing the house, was controlled by a chip in the front of the book; and the back, toward the jungle, by a chip in the back of the book. Unlock the front, and the front lever worked – you could press it down, open the door, and go in. The door would lock behind you. Unlock the back, and you could go out. The side you had unlocked remained unlocked for about two minutes. To go in *and* come out, you had to have two cards, or the book. Or something else like that. Why do it that way? I think I know, but I’ll leave it up to you to figure it out. (192)
337
338[Well, how then did Ern enter through the window and escape through the door before, without the book? Earlier in the text, Colette discusses a locked door which can be opened by pressing a lever or a release hidden on the inside. The presence of Ern, given Conrad’s interest in him and his work, might somehow serve to open the door from the inside, though this would imply some ability to manipulate and influence library reclones on the part of Conrad, Sr., (or Cob).]
339
340Still unaware of how the door works, they attempt to block it with tape and by holding the handle firmly, though no one attempts to follow them. Ern shows Georges the reactor, and the ex-cop informs him that the uranium reaction is controlled by raising or lowering carbon rods. There seems to be enough rods to keep the generator running for at least three years without supervision. [This estimate of “three years” also resonates symbolically with something that seems to have been set in motion three years before, from the death of Colette’s mother and the cloning of Smithe.]
341
342Ern returns to his preoccupation with listening devices, cards, and weapons. “If there are two cards [to the door], I want us to have them both” (197). At the mysterious car behind the house, Georges goes on to show him how the cars are locked with combinations. After going through several possible codes for the five-button entry, Georges tries A,C,E – for Ace Rentals. It succeeds in opening the car. He finds paperwork in the glovebox which indicates that Colette Coldbrook rented the vehicle in Owenbright. Ern tells Georges the story of Colette’s disappearance. [Too bad we never get to meet the locksmith who opened Mr. Coldbrook’s safe, eh?]
343
344During Ern’s briefing, Georges reveals that he looked up the name Coldbrook during his own search, and found three companies with that name, as well as the newsletter, which is now run by someone else. Colette seemed to be the only surviving relative. Mahala offers to look for more information and asks the wife’s name. Georges remembers it, as well as the spelling: Joanne Rebecca Carole. Ern assumes that Colette must have escaped from her kidnappers in Owenbright.
345
346Ern takes leave of his companions and returns to the lab, where he left the book in the unlocked safe. He reenters the door on the fourth floor alone, going to the hole in the cliff face. His book unlocks a gate within the cave, and he finds a rifle leaning against a table inside: “That was the first thing I found in Conrad Coldbrook’s mine, but not the last. Not by a long shot” (204).
347
348When he returns, Ern learns that Mahala has contacted Alice Carole, Colette’s grandmother, who will call the police to report that her granddaughter is missing. [How then were Payne and Fish so certain that Colette had already been taken? Assuming teacher’s work schedules remain similar to modern conventions, Colette does not seem to work in July and might not have been missed yet.] In addition, Mahala has found the housekeeper who once worked for the Coldbrooks, Judy Peters. With some instruction from Georges, Ern drives them in the rented car to a rest stop, where he shows them the emeralds he found in the mine. He makes them an offer: they can choose to split the emeralds and go their separate ways, or stay together, sell six of the seven, and continue the search for Colette. Georges accepts the second offer. Ern admits that they might attain more emeralds someday, but it is not a certain prospect.
349
350Using the receipts found in the safe, they find a jeweler who previously dealt with Conrad Coldbrook. Ern begins by telling the jeweler, “I take it you know that both Conrad Coldbrook and his son are dead. … Did you know Conrad, Junior, well?” (210)
351
352The jeweler responds, “I didn’t know him at all. His father had mentioned him once or twice. I never met him” (210). He does confirm that he conducted business with Mr. Coldbrook after the death of his son, though Conrad “didn’t talk about his personal affairs” (211). [The jeweler represents another strange inconsistency in the narrative Ern establishes by the end of the novel. Is he simply lying about not knowing the son? Colette’s final story seems to indicate that Cob sold emeralds to the jeweler, and that Conrad, Sr., only figured out that Cob was the one who had opened his safe through the same jeweler, prompting him to kill his son. If Cob did not actually sell the emeralds, then where did the money Colette supposedly took from his bag, which he wanted to give to his father, come from? Or did she merely ransack it for the book, lying about Cob giving it to her entirely and about the money within?] When Ern mentions that Conrad had a daughter, the merchant only says, “Did he?” (211) [Did he, dear reader?]
353
354After some haggling, they sell six of the emeralds. After that, they come to a complicated agreement to receive payment, involving checks written on three different accounts. Concluding that business, Ern bids his comrades good night. He awakens in the middle of the night and decides to go through the door yet again, in the wee hours of July 29th or 30th. He finds that it is still daylight on the other side of the door. He retrieves the rifle and sits outside with it, figuring out how to work its mechanism. He notes that some parts which might have been steel in his original time have been replaced with something else. [I am tempted to suggest that this a metaphor for Ern himself, as Wolfe has done a similar symbolic coding with weapons and the main characters in *Home Fires*.] The weapon is also lighter than he expects it to be. He then goes down to the beach where he spoke with Mahala and Georges and thinks “about what we had said and what I had not said” (215). [Their conversation covered the source of Mr. Coldbrook’s wealth. What exactly is Ern withholding here?]
355
356He examines the place where they previously encountered the “scarecrows,” as he and Georges have taken to calling the alien creatures. In his desire to use the rifle, he consider: “If I needed to fire the rifle, I was going to have to drop the book; and if it was gone when I tried to come back for it, I would have to stay here for the rest of my days” (216). He stashes it in a log and walks away. He wades into the water and then along the beach, thinking, “I ought to have remembered sitting on the bank with Colette when all this began, and how blue the little stream we had splashed in had looked” (217). [This definitely draws a connection between the color blue and Colette Coldbrook.]
357
358As the sun recedes and his shadow lengthens, he decides to turn back, but a large black bump in the water distracts him. It approaches quickly and assumes monstrous proportions. Ern’s fear grows when he realizes it is walking on the bottom, towering above the surface of the water. As it reaches the beach, Ern foolishly approaches it; its lumps begin moving. He notes, “The head was coming out, a flat stone-ugly head that only looked small because the rest of the animal was so big, but was really about the size of a washing machine. If it had eyes, I never saw them; but it had a beak sort of like a hawk’s or an eagle’s, and it was white on the inside – so white that it practically glowed in the dim light” (219).
359
360The lumps jump down, becoming smaller beaked creatures. They begin chasing Ern, who flees through the trees on the island. He manages to shoot one of the pursuers, and eventually reaches a beach to wait for them. With no sign of further pursuit, Ern watches the moon come up, and he determines that it must be so bright because of ice. [This puts him in mind of when he queried the library about Earth’s moon – he states, “There’s surface ice on our moon, too. Not much but some” (221). The imagery of the ice on the moon might not be truly important, but it resonates with the hot and cold imagery we have mentioned throughout.] Sitting on the log, Ern takes off his shoes, as he considers wading out into the water. His thoughts stray to dying, and this leads him to considering the fire:
361
362>By that I mean the one they burn you in when you are just about worn out or if you live on your shelf day after day and hardly ever get consulted or borrowed. I have never really been in it, but I know that it is in a special room in the basement. And I have seen it on a screen. I researched it, you know I did, and there was a neat little piece about it with some old worn-out guy getting burned. They had doped him so that he thought he was asleep, only he was really on this moving chain-belt. He was not tied down or anything because he was so out of it they had not had to tie him.
363
364>You go in headfirst, and I saw one of his legs move just a little. (221-2)
365
366[We should note that the pagination on *A Borrowed Man* is not typical of Wolfe’s work, with larger font and less populated pages. At the very start of the novel, when Ern was discussing the possible manner in which a secret might be hidden in a book, he used two examples which mentioned page two twenty-one. The first is an errata sheet by the publisher, the second by an individual: “‘On page two twenty-one *store age* should be *storage*.’ …‘On page two twenty-one, the formula such-and-so has been omitted’” (14). Perhaps this second errata sheet should put us in mind of the blue book taken from Roglich’s shelf, but it is odd that this vision of an old and worn out reclone being drugged and burned would begin on the same page in *A Borrowed Man*. Coincidence? Perhaps. Ern also gave several other examples of how he might conceal secrets, including one which mentioned coding one in “a standard reference such as *Common Deciduous Trees of Our New America*” (13). He happens to be sitting on a log (with something hidden inside it he is consciously unaware of) during these later ruminations.]
367
368Indeed, Ern soon claims that the driftwood he was sitting on happened to be the one in which he concealed the book. He returns to Earth with the rifle. At breakfast, he discusses eephones with Georges. After considering how to get a number and the futility of attempting to employ one someone else already has, Ern asks if an eephone might work through the strange door. Georges believes it would definitely work if the door was open or if its steel was replaced. [When Ern first described the door standing in the middle of the jungle, he noted that it seemed to be normal ponticwood, but a few pages later he reveals that it was steel painted to appear that way.] They discuss that when the minutes on a temporary eephone are used up, it is then merely refuse to be discarded: “They used to make them reloadable, but some smart hackers figured out how to do it and make hundreds of free calls. So you can’t. Could you take one apart and use some of the parts to build your own eephone? Sure, if you were a genius – but you’d need some other parts, too. Maybe you could buy those. I don’t know” (225).
369
370[This discussion of used up eephones might in some way reflect on Conrad, Sr., and reclones, discarded after their use, given Conrad’s special “genius” for turning a profit and the talent that Roglich mentioned. Might Conrad, Sr., or his son have performed a similar “reloading” with Ern?]
371
372The allies find that there are three ground cars in the garage: “A classy limo, a sleek red convertible, and a big alterrain” (226). Georges choses to drive the convertible. Ern returns the rental car and joins them in the red car. They then go to interrogate Judy Peters, who once worked for the Coldbrooks. She tells them she was at the Coldbrook’s for three years. Her husband passed away six years before, and she has two daughters, Spring and Summer. Spring is a teacher in Nuevo Dinero [New Money] and Summer is a heart surgeon in Kokolik City. [Would a heart surgeon be privy to undetectable drugs which might mimic cardiac arrest or be useful in obtaining them? Also, we should note that Spring, a mixture of hot and cold weather, seems to be living in a hot environment, while Summer, a season associated with heat, is now living in what might be Alaska, certainly still cold.]
373
374After revealing that she and Colette were friends, Judy says that Conrad, Sr., hired her after the death of his wife, who did not want servants. Ern asks about the ground cars that the family had, which were taken care of by Cob, and Mrs. Peters says that there were only two: a large sedan and an alterrain – and that though both young people might drive the alterrain, she kept the card for it. He learns the names of the other servants who were hired, including the picky cook, Ms. Keck. [Incidentally, this name implies a feeling that one is going to vomit or retch in German.]
375
376In the spring of the previous year, the human servants were all dismissed; Mr. Coldbrook transitioned to a robotic staff. Mrs. Peters also reveals that one of the cleaning girls, Ella-Jean, went to work for Span & Spic afterwards, a cleaning service that periodically worked at the house. Cob had called them in, and Ella-Jean had informed Mrs. Peters that the son thought his father was dead: “He’d been gone for half a year, and nobody had heard a word from him” (232). Colette had left to teach before her father’s disappearance.
377
378>“I know [Cob] thought he was dead. Everybody did. He hadn’t told Master Conrad he was going anywhere, or packed a bag, or taken a ground car or a flitter, or anything. I talked to one of those ‘bots, too, while I was there. That was while I was waiting for Master Conrad to see me. He was busy with something for an hour and over. I don’t know what it was. Probably that girl he was going to marry had screened him, or else he’d screened her” (233).
379
380Cob wanted to close the house, but his father’s sudden disappearance prevented him from acting. Mrs. Peters says that the father returned “after Master Conrad passed away” (233). She also notes that Colette and her brother fought a bit when they were younger, but had since become close, acting as if it was “them against the world” (234). She supposes that Mrs. Coldbrook might have been suicidal, and she could have ordered a bot to kill her. The meals between the father and his children were conspicuously quiet. There were never any guests at the house.
381
382This makes Ern think of hiring Mrs. Peters, and he invites Georges to ask her his own questions. Mrs. Peters reveals that on some trips Conrad, Sr., would pack his suitcase and that he even had a cabin in the mountains, though she knows nothing else about it. He is buried in the Old Church Yard, a new graveyard on the west side. Ern offers Mrs. Peters a position.
383
384Next, Ern decides to take the car, named Geraldine (by Cob, he believes) to the coroner’s office. He wants Mahala to figure out which mortuary prepared Mr. Coldbrook’s body. At the medical examiner’s office, Georges says that they will take information on Cob’s death as well, and they confirm that he was strangled. There was no examination performed on the father: “No reason for one. Do you want the attendant physician’s report? It’s cardiac arrest” (239). Ern is interested in the police report on the son’s death, but Georges says that neither he nor Mahala can help him with that. They let him out some blocks from police headquarters, and agree to rendezvous at the bus station afterwards.
385
386In the station, Ern uses a “false ID that had been Colette’s father’s” (241). After Ern leaves the police, he realizes he is being followed by a small person in a black raincoat and hat (in July). Ern manages to get behind his tail in a department store, finding him, as he describes, “smack in the middle of women’s clothing, looking around for me” (242).
387
388Ern recognizes Chick and mentions that he wants to buy some hot chocolate and a sandwich for him. Somehow, Georges also appears and strong-arms Chick into obeying. On the fifth floor, they go to “Alice’s Tea Room,” which Ern describes as “a little bit too lady-like for three guys, maybe, what with the faux-linen tablecloths and napkins, the expensive looking tableware, and the polished crystal wineglasses” (243).
389
390[Of course, we should emphasize that all of the imagery associated with Chick is extremely feminine, from being caught in women’s clothing to eating at a “lady-like” establishment. The name of Colette’s grandmother (Alice Carole) and the meeting here in Alice’s Tea Room might be construed by some readers as a kind of *Alice in Wonderland* or *Through the Looking Glass* reference, but I can’t make much of that as concerns the rest of the plot of *A Borrowed Man*. While I am being candid and breaking into first person, I should here acknowledge that my very helpful editor, Matthew King, first introduced me to the possibility that Chick might be somewhat ambiguous in gender. Sorry this book is so late, Matthew.]
391
392Ern’s tail finally identifies himself by name. Georges asserts that any ID Chick carries will be fake. Ern wonders, “whether Chick’s fake ID would be as good as you could get with the app I had turned up on Conrad Coldbrook’s screen” (243). Suddenly, Ern is concerned that Chick might reveal the writer is merely a reclone in front of Georges. They learn that Chick’s boss is looking for Ern.
393
394Somehow, Chick even knows about what happened at the Coldbrook mansion earlier: “They both heard your ground car and went over to the window, and you got out with some other guy and a woman” (244). Chick identifies his boss as a government cop working for Niagara and the Continental Government. Clearly frightened, Chick threatens that he can get rough if necessary.
395
396A ‘bot approaches with a call for Georges, who excuses himself to take it in private. Chick notes, “Your buddy’s got problems” (246). Chick agrees to reveal his boss’s name if Ern lets him know why he went to the police station. After seeing the report of Cob’s death, Chick says, “See, I can tell you what my boss says his name is, an’ I think it’s the pure. Only I don’t know for sure an’ can’t prove it. Dane van Petten is what he says. The other cops call him Dane” (247).
397
398Georges returns in time to assert that Chick must have arrived in New Delphi via bus. Chick’s first priority, he claims, is to find out what Ern is doing there and the identity of the man and woman he is with. His other task is to find out how Ern knew where Dane and Colette were. Ern says, “Basically I came because I was terribly concerned about Colette. That’s your boss’s girlfriend, I take it.”
399
400Chick responds, “That’s what he calls her, yeah” (249). Ern goes on to say that the mystery seems to revolve around the fortune that Colette stood to inherit, and that “If only I understood the fate that had overtaken Conrad Coldbrook, Junior, I might understand the entire affair” (250).
401
402[Chick’s revelation of Dane’s name is even put under some suspicion: might Dane in fact be someone in disguise? How, then, could he attain his position? So that you may be as insane as I am, reader, I shall now reveal one more possibly spurious allusion: once upon a time, there was a French novelist (nominated for the Nobel Prize, even!) who went by the name Colette. Her father was a tax-collector, and though initially they had substantial wealth, poor financial management relegated her to attend public schools. Let’s assume this has nothing to do with *A Borrowed Man* for now.]
403
404When Georges explains how he met Ern, Chick seems to disbelieve it. However, he agrees to throw in his lot with Ern and his friends. Ern requests that Chick go to the library and check out a copy of Arabella Lee for a week, if they have her, and to meet them at the Coldbrook mansion. [While on its surface the text of *A Borrowed Man* does not seem ludicrously allusive, it could be that peripheral allusions to Poe, Dickens, C. A. Smith, Colette, Chatterton, Dryden, and Shakespeare ground it in a literary conversation that is slightly more convoluted than we first supposed.]
405
406Georges reveals that Mahala had seen a tall brunette, whom she identified as Colette from the pictures in the sunroom, enter the bus station looking for someone. This causes Ern to think about motivations: “Motivations are always important, and I haven’t been thinking nearly enough about them. Not principally about yours or Mahala’s, but I’m going to start with those” (253).
407
408Georges acknowledges that it is Mahala whom the police are looking for, in order to lock her away. He came to the department store to buy clothes and a bag while Mahala waited at the station. Ern asks how Mahala knew Georges would be in the restaurant, and Georges supposes that she tried miscellaneous departments such as Menswear or Lingerie before calling the alphabetically foremost, Alice’s Tea Room.
409
410Ern asks for whom Colette was looking in the bus terminal, and Georges suggests that it was Chick. Ern says, “I doubt it. A better one would be his boss, van Petten, but I believe there’s another that’s better still. … I’m going to reserve that. It’s a mere guess, but it’s mine until we know more. Why did they come here?” (254)
411
412[Will Ern ever fill us in on the better guess? Of course not. Is he supposing that Colette has come looking for Mahala and Georges? Then why would Georges let Ern know about it? Our cast of characters isn’t huge, and some of them are supposedly already dead.]
413
414Ern supposes that Colette was scared to return to her apartment to get her two-seated flitter, and that she is with van Petten. Ern wonders what might have brought them to New Delphi. Georges offers two options: 
415
416>“One of the ‘bots back at the house was under orders to screen her if we showed up, and did. Probably the maid. … [Or] Chick called in yesterday. Not just to tell van Petten he’d gotten here, but something else that made Colette and van Patten [sic] move fast. … By the way, are we on their side? Or are we going to try to get her away from him?” (256)
417
418[This might be the second place, besides right before Colette and Ern speak with Roglich, where a day might be omitted from the text. However, the most likely chasm in Ern’s story still occurs between Coldbrook mansion and Roglich’s office.]
419
420The text cuts to Ern approaching the mansion after paying off his cab, “Like somebody I had been thinking about” [Cob] (257). Ern realizes that he is going to be alone again, and that he “had known it ever since Georges and Mahala had left [him] to shop, with instructions to meet at the bus station” (257). In the house, Colette hugs him and van Petten shakes his hand, despite an obvious revulsion for reclones. Colette says that she is going to buy Ern from the library. When he tells her about Payne and Fish’s interrogation and notes that he was forced to describe her mother, Colette asks, “Did they know about the book?” (260)
421
422When van Petten demands that Ern tell him about it, he replies that “For some reason her father seems to have valued it” (260). Van Petten believes that Colette is curious about who has checked Ern out because, “[S]he wants to see if you’ve been checked out by other women” (261). [It is entirely conceivable, given the possibility that Cob’s fiancée or even Colette’s mother is somehow operating in the text, that this curiosity is not mere jealousy.]
423
424The threat of burning seems to hang over their conversation, though Colette assures Ern that she would not allow him to perish in such a fashion even if they purchased him. They are interrupted by the arrival of Mrs. Peters, and Colette greets her joyously. Van Petten, however, is not thrilled at the prospect of keeping both Ern and Mrs. Peters. Colette says, “You have to get used to him and he has to get used to you, that’s all. I love you, and he’s very nice. He’s useful, too, and loyal and clever. You should be glad I’ve got something like him” (263).
425
426The conversation eventually turns to listening devices, and van Petten admits he had hoped to record Colette’s father’s conversations with Roglich. They are interrupted again by the arrival of Arabella and Chick. Arabella says, “Ern! He said you were here but I couldn’t believe it. … Ern, you freezing son of a bitch, aren’t you going to introduce me?” (265) [The dichotomy between hot and cold is driven home powerfully in this description, and will be worth returning to shortly. In the earlier dream, Arabella had been associated with a gentle heat.]
427
428Finally, we learn that Dane works for the Continental Office of Emolument, or, as Ern says, that he is a tax collector. Chick explains to van Petten what happened, and that Ern was accompanied by a male and a female. “George was the guy, probably. Smithe says the woman was his secretary. It looks like we’ve got her already” (266). [There are two things worthy of note here. One is that Chick refers to Georges by his real name’s spelling, which might be indicative of a pre-existing relationship. Also, Chick might be referring to the presence of Mrs. Peters at the house when he says that they already have the secretary, but it otherwise seems to be a *non sequitur* which implicates Mahala. Early in the book, Ern says that “You couldn’t hide an enormous secret in minor corrections of punctuation and the like, or I don’t see how you could,” but perhaps here the omission of one letter from Georges’s name is significant (24).]
429
430Van Petten demands Ern’s money, and he responds, “We not fully humans are not subject to taxation, nor is there a tax on property possessed by municipalities. If there were such a tax – […] – the Spice Grove Public Library, to which I belong, would be responsible for paying its share. Or so I’d think. Not me” (267). [If one were looking for a motive for manipulating reclones, perhaps Conrad, Sr., was looking to cheat the two most unavoidable and enduring threats known to humanity – death and taxes.]
431
432Van Petten signals that Colette and Ern should be left alone, providing that Ern is willing to reveal the location of the book. Colette and Ern go out to a garden which recalls their initial encounter. He says:
433
434>“Before we went to Owenbright, I hid the book among the other books in your father’s library.” Sometimes I feel terribly guilty when I lie; but what I feel when I lie is nothing at all compared to the guilt I felt then, when I had told Colette the truth. (270)
435
436She reveals that Chick found out Ern had been selling emeralds, prompting her and Dane to return to the mansion. [This knowledge would probably require the cooperation of the jeweler or of Georges and Mahala in order for Chick to know about it.] Colette and Ern discuss how humanity has changed, though from the outside it looks peaceful and quiet. She reveals that when she studied history at college, behind all the artificial and trendy study options including fashion and other ephemeral topics, the real history of humanity was:
437
438>“largely the history of war, of people killing one another. The reasons for wars differed, but the result was always the same. Stones and arrows and spears and blood at first. Then bullets and shells and poison gas. Bombs, rockets, flying ‘bots, and blood. And more blood, always more blood. … Torpidity is fine with me, Ern, I like it.” (272)
439
440The fierce struggle for resources has ceased, because it simply isn’t worth the effort any more, and the remaining factions of humanity are tired and weak. Governments have the knowledge but lack the resources to produce terrible weapons. Colette says, “They no longer inspire loyalty. We know they don’t deserve it, and the more thoughtful of us even suspect they never did. It’s a good time to be alive” (273). Ern fears that the book will bring back the “bad” times again. “I showed her where I had put the book. It was gone, and we both looked for it in case I had forgotten exactly where. Naturally we did not find it. It was hidden again, but this time up in the lab. All the time I kept thinking I ought to have left it buried in the sand under the driftwood” (273). Afterwards, Ern learns that Georges and Mahala came by and left a number for him to call them.
441
442Now the book enters its final chapter, and, shockingly, it is slightly unclear if a day has passed since the previous chapter or not, though it does not seem that this is the case. Regardless, this is, according to Ern, July 30th at last, the day on which he should be returned to the library. If no day has passed, then the missing day had to occur earlier in the text. The chapter begins:
443
444>I think I told you yesterday that the book was not really in Conrad Coldbrook’s library anymore. I had put it in the safe upstairs, up in the lab that had been his. Now it was hidden elsewhere in the laboratory. Even though I could not be sure when I hid it, I felt certain that Colette was not likely to look there; so I had picked the best place. (274)
445
446[At first, I read that final sentence as Ern being unsure of when he hid the book, indicative of another part in his personality acting without his full conscious knowledge, but it seems more likely that this verbal structure merely implies that he had no way of knowing if Colette would look there when he hid it. This might be a less satisfying but more likely reading of the sentence; he remembers exactly when he hid it there, even though we never got a full view of that moment.]
447
448The action begins with Ern in the company of van Petten and Colette. Van Petten takes Ern to the lab and dismisses her. Van Petten believes that Ern attained the emeralds from the lab. Ern says that he got them from a drawer. Van Petten believes that Conrad, Sr., found a way to manufacture them. Ern responds, “I’m going to try telling you the truth, and if that doesn’t work, I have some good lies all ready to go. Here’s the truth” (275). He says that Conrad mined the emeralds from a small mine, but it took some time. When Ern reaches in his pocket for the final emerald, he finds that it is next to Georges’s note, and he fears that they will come out together.
449
450In their discussion, van Petten reveals that the other man in Colette’s apartment was his boss. [Could the close juxtaposition of Georges’s note, threatening to fall out with the emerald, and mention of Dane’s boss indicate a relationship between the two men? If this is the case, certainly Georges had to have undergone some cosmetic alteration between the beginning and the middle of the book, something not supported by the text at all, in order to avoid being recognized by Ern.] Ern shows him where he has hidden the book, taped behind one of the screens. He says, “I wrote it during my first life, while I was still legally human. There’s a brief passage urging that space itself might be manipulated as other physical objects are. Conrad Coldbrook must have found it suggestive” (278). [Could this be one of the prepared “lies,” conscious or not? When he first hears of the book, Ern says, “[T]his one must have been written after my death. I don’t remember it at all” (24). It should be clear from some of my asides by now that this seems to be a consideration worth entertaining. Now that we are approaching the denouement, it is worth describing the cover of *Murder on Mars*: it features “two planets, the larger one mottled blue and white, the smaller one dark, red, scarred, and choked by a snake” (32). Certainly, Colette’s mother is associated with blue and white, but the smaller one being “choked by a snake” might also resonate with something that has occurred in the text.]
451
452Ern leads van Petten through the door, noting that Mr. Coldbrook’s poetic sense of fitness was greatly preferable to his son’s humor: “This book opens the door to a distant world indeed” (279). When van Petten rushes to the mine, Ern steps backwards and holds the door handle until it locks. He then sabotages the safety rods in the reactor. When he runs into Colette, she admits that, even though he is nice about it, van Petten has her under arrest. She signed a confession indicating that she knew her father had some secret source of income that she failed to report. Colette wants to leave the house, but she asks Ern if he knows anything about emeralds, then, “Is it all right if we take Judy?” (281) Ern ignores the question concerning gems and advises her to get a good lawyer. Colette wants to buy a house on the coast so she can look at the ocean, closing up the Coldbrook estate. [This is the same ambition Conrad, Jr., had, more or less.]
453
454At this point, Ern calls Georges and tells him to stay away from the house, which is dangerous, though Ern might be in touch later. He is concerned both about the reactor, now a time-bomb, and the return of Dane van Petten, speculating, “[M]aybe he had some sort of supercard that would open any door, and that was how he and his boss had gotten in to Colette’s the first time I had seen him” (282). [Either they had exceptional clearance or something about them resonated with Cob.]
455
456Here, Colette returns, indicating that she wants Judy to drive the alterrain to Spice Grove. She says that Dane and she came in her vehicle, which only seats two. She asks if he can fly one of the vehicles back for her. Ern’s reaction is perhaps exaggerated: “‘Certainly.’ I do not believe I have ever said one single thing that scared me more than that did, so I held it to one word, afraid that I was going to choke or start stammering” (284). [This strong reaction, even with the knowledge that Colette may have killed her father, is almost inexplicable, but it is accompanied with choking.]
457
458She tells him that the code is C-O-N-C for the vehicles, named Cat and Canary. Ern takes the yellow one. [The code probably stands for Con. Coldbrook, which puts a new and more deceptive spin on the patriarch’s name, though Cob shares his name as well.] Before leaving, Ern finds Arabella in the library, reading the opening passage from Clark Ashton Smith’s poem “The Hasish Eater – or - The Apocalypse of Evil.”
459
460[While the opening stanza quoted in the book seems harmless enough, in which the emperor of dreams crowns himself with the colors of secret worlds, the rest of the poem goes on and on in its relentless and baroque monstrosity, with hellish vistas and monstrous threats, eventually dissolving in a fiery fate. There are many images in the poem which might be thematically applicable to something like *The Book of the New Sun* or *The Book of the Short Sun*, but only certain echoes seem to resonate with the plot of *A Borrowed Man*. The length of the poem would definitely prevent me from ever recommending it to anyone. Below are a few stanzas which mention poison, torpidity, and fire. The motif of a tortured prisoner and a poisonous female serpent below is only one point of synchronicity. The very end of the poem involves a dissolution into flame, which might be apt given the destiny Ern is trying to avoid.
461
462>As brazen hammers make, by devils dinned
463
464>On tombs of all the dead; and nevermore
465
466>I find the gorget, but at length I find
467
468>A sealèd room whose nameless prisoner
469
470>Moans with a nameless torture, and would turn
471
472>To hell's red rack as to a lilied couch
473
474>From that whereon they stretched him; and I find,
475
476>Prostrate upon a lotus-painted floor,
477
478>The loveliest of all beloved slaves
479
480>My emperor hath, and from her pulseless side
481
482>A serpent rises, whiter than the root
483
484>Of some venefic bloom in darkness grown,
485
486>And gazes up with green-lit eyes that seem
487
488>Like drops of cold, congealing poison. …
489
490The dream is obsessed with jewels, and of course it also makes mention of emeralds:
491
492>A crackling smile around that circle runs,
493
494>And all the stone-wrought gibbons stare at me
495
496>With eyes that turn to glowing coals. A fear
497
498>That found no name in Babel, flings me on,
499
500>Breathless and faint with horror, to a hall
501
502>Within whose weary, self-reverting round,
503
504>The languid curtains, heavier than palls,
505
506>Unnumerably depict a weary king
507
508>Who fain would cool his jewel-crusted hands
509
510>In lakes of emerald evening, or the field
511
512>Of dreamless poppies pure with rain. …
513
514In the poem, the speaker does encounter, in his dreams and visions or in reality, an enthroned Worm which might be close to the figure of the gestalt creature Ern encounters on the other side of the door, though the resemblance is forced and uncertain. Note the use of the word torpid:
515
516>I reach a room where caryatids,
517
518>Carved in the form of voluptuous Titan women,
519
520>Surround a throne flowering ebony
521
522>Where creeps a vine of crystal. On the throne
523
524>There lolls a wan, enormous Worm, whose bulk,
525
526>Tumid with all the rottenness of kings,
527
528>Overflows its arms with fold on creasèd fold
529
530>Obscenely bloating. Open-mouthed he leans,
531
532>And from his fulvous throat a score of tongues,
533
534>Depending like to wreaths of torpid vipers,
535
536>Drivel with phosphorescent slime, that runs
537
538>Down all his length of soft and monstrous folds,
539
540>And creeping among the flowers of ebony,
541
542>Lends them the life of tiny serpents …
543
544These images are closer to those found in *Murder on Mars* than in *A Borrowed Man*. The white eyeless face invoked here before the fiery ending might also resonate with the bright maw of the strange creature Ern fled on the other side of the door. The poem ends:
545
546>As tempests in a broken fane, and roar
547
548>Of sphinxes, like relentless toll of bells
549
550>From towers infernal. Cloud on hellish cloud
551
552>They arch the zenith, and a dreadful wind
553
554>Falls from them like the wind before the storm,
555
556>And in the wind my riven garment streams
557
558>And flutters in the face of all the void,
559
560>Even as flows a flaffing spirit, lost
561
562>On the pit s undying tempest. Louder grows
563
564>The thunder of the streams of stone and bronze—
565
566>Redoubled with the roar of torrent wings
567
568>Inseparable mingled. Scarce I keep
569
570>My footing in the gulfward winds of fear,
571
572>And mighty thunders beating to the void
573
574>In sea-like waves incessant; and would flee
575
576>With them, and prove the nadir-founded night
577
578>Where fall the streams of ruin. But when I reach
579
580>The verge, and seek through sun-defeating gloom
581
582>To measure with my gaze the dread descent,
583
584>I see a tiny star within the depths-
585
586>A light that stays me while the wings of doom
587
588>Convene their thickening thousands: for the star
589
590>increases, taking to its hueless orb,
591
592>With all the speed of horror-changèd dreams,
593
594>The light as of a million million moons;
595
596>And floating up through gulfs and glooms eclipsed
597
598>It grows and grows, a huge white eyeless Face
599
600>That fills the void and fills the universe,
601
602>And bloats against the limits of the world
603
604>With lips of flame that open . . .
605
606Alas, I was not spared the horror of reading this entire poem. If there was once wit linked to my madness, now no trace of it remains.]
607
608Returning to our book, Ern says that he dislikes the poem, but that it is stuck in his brain: “probably you can guess why” (285). Arabella goes with him in Canary to Spice Grove, and they fly close to the mountains, taking in the natural beauty. At Taos Towers, Mrs. Peters and Colette reminisce, while Ern and Arabella retire early. Ern estimates that the last time he made love with Arabella had been “137 years almost to the day” (287). Afterwards, he kisses her cheek and, as he writes, “said goodbye in my heart” (287).
609
610He finds Colette alone, simply staring into space. He makes her promise to check him out next year, and each year after that, in exchange for his silence. We also learn that, as Ern composes his story, the reactor has since gone up: “Goodbye to the scarecrows, to the emeralds, and to the stars!” (288)
611
612Ern tells Colette she has always been special to him, but her elaborate lie, telling him that her father had died before her brother, was too cunning of a fabrication. He asks if Cob truly told her that there was only a book in the safe, and she nods. [Why, then, would she have mentioned emeralds earlier in the text as something Cob did not find, a passing mention which led Ern to the “truth”? This is one of several potential fracture points in our understanding of Colette and her knowledge. Of course, when we turn the page Colette says that her father knew Cob had been the one to open the safe because, “He explained to the jeweler. He told me” (290). While the “he” is ambiguous here, it certainly seems as if she is saying that either Cob told the jeweler how he got the jewels (which doesn’t seem likely) or Conrad, Sr., asked the jeweler if anyone else had sold the jeweler uncut emeralds, and the answer he heard incriminated Cob. This does not match Colette’s earlier claim that she has no knowledge of anything else in the safe, and also does not jive with the jeweler’s assertion that he never met Cob. Is Colette really that poor of a liar?]
613
614In any case, Ern believes that Cob found both emeralds and receipts in the safe, and that eventually the father returned, possibly with more jewels. When he asks if Colette knows where they came from, she responds, “No. No, I don’t. Are you going to tell me?” (290) [Where did she disappear to when Georges, Mahala, and Ern showed up at Coldbrook mansion, then?!!]
615
616Ern pretends that he does not know. Colette claims that Cob was in her apartment, having taken the book to her, when her father called her: “I didn’t know why he was so angry with Cob; and I was afraid he’d be angry with me if he found out. He was – was truly savage when he was angry, Ern. Savage, and he held grudges. You didn’t know him!” (291) [The most savage display we actually see in the text involves Ern’s beating of the bruised man who takes his place on the bus, kicking him afterwards.]
617
618Colette claims that she returned to the mansion and attempted to placate her father; she also advised Cob to wait before speaking to Conrad, Sr., but he returned that very day to New Delphi, supposedly with money to give to his father. When he mentions that Conrad strangled Cob, Colette begins crying, denying that she was there: “You’ve got to believe that! I wasn’t” (292).
619
620She says her father waited in the coatroom until Cob entered the house, pouncing upon him and choking him. Ern accuses her of watching it, and surmises that Cob arrived in a cab: “No one with money would drive from Spice Grove to New Delphi unless he were trying to evade arrest” (292). He assumes Cob took a commercial flight and caught a cab to the house. [This establishes that Colette’s earlier drive from Spice Grove to New Delphi was unusual, I suppose.] 
621
622Ern does not want Colette to buy him, merely to check him out one day a year. He says that she was an instrument of justice. Ern also discusses different types of murder, and says that occasionally murderers:
623
624>“kill relatives from whom they expect an inheritance. That’s what you did, and it’s why this whole situation is so dangerous for you. You were an instrument of justice and I know it; but if you’re tried, the prosecution will never allow it. The prosecutor will say – will insist – that you killed your father to get his money.” (294)
625
626Colette says that she saw her father strangling Cob, and Ern answers:
627
628>“Your brother was killed by a tall man with strong hands. The police report made that clear. I don’t suppose you know what the rarest of all murders is? ... It is the killing of a son by his father. That one almost never happens, which was one reason the police were disinclined to suspect your father. That, and your swearing that your father was away when Cob died. In addition to those two, his wealth and the fact that your brother’s suitcase had been searched. Where was the money?” (294-5)
629
630Colette admits that she searched the suitcase for money, to seek justice, though her father died of a heart attack before she could do so. Ern finally aims his accusation at her: “[Y]ou poisoned him” (295). Upon arriving with Arabella, Ern realized when Colette did not forbid him from the kitchen that she must have already disposed of the incriminating evidence. Colette claims she was afraid she would use the poison again, but on Dane. Ern ends by saying, “Your father’s fortune is coming to you in dribs and drabs. You won’t get most of it until you’re thirty. You won’t get Cob’s share of it until his murder is solved, which probably means never” (296). [If Cob preceded his father in death, why should the money be wrapped up in this fashion? Would proximity in death still keep the inheritance from proceeding?]
631
632Ern says that he is leaving a full account of her father’s death that will be found when he dies, but only then. Colette asks if they are still friends as Ern prepares to leave. “I hope so. I’d like that a lot” (297).
633
634Ern walks to the Spice Grove Public Library. As he approaches, his watch strikes midnight, and the book closes, “It was July thirty-first, and I was overdue” (297).
635
636## Thoughts from Others
637
638Given that this essay is at its heart confronting the reception of a text, I feel it is worthwhile to present a free and unstructured look at some of the analytical efforts on the *Urth Mailing List*, a group without which, I have no doubt, I would never have begun this project. Since the archives in recent years have been spotty and inconsistent, I will use the dates of the list emails and attempt to preserve some of the original verbiage in these discussions. In an initial response to the novel, written on October 25th, 2015, Andrew Bollen notes some of the lingering questions left after reading the text:
639
640> Overall, I think it's quite a powerful story, but either the plot is pretty flaky, or I haven't read it very well, or we're supposed to pull on some of these threads [and] uncover something hidden. All thoughts welcome!
641
642>1. The whole set-up. I find it very hard to suspend disbelief re author-clones as "library resources". How many clones per library? Surely for the idea to make any sense there would have to be lots [and] lots - in the same way a library without lots [and] lots of books doesn't make much sense. But I don't get the sense of lots of clones in any of the libraries.
643
644>And if there are just a few - does it make sense to include clones of writers nobody is very interested in? Smithe has been out of the incubator for about 3 years [and] before the events of [*A Borrowed Man*] he'd been borrowed just once. Why would anybody "publish" and waste clone-shelf-space on a writer in such low demand?
645
646>And Arabella: by all indications she's an obscure poet, yet we meet 3 of her clones in 10 days.
647
648Bollen brings up some excellent points here, and I think there should be some significant plot reason for the different treatment that Ern receives from the various copies of Arabella. He continues:
649
650>2. Smithe can write. At least with a keyboard, and at least in the library. So does the neural block against writing not apply to keyboards - which would seem pretty dumb - or has he managed to work around it somehow?
651
652Given the vague idea we have that there is *something* or *someone* else sharing space in Ern’s mind, we might be able to explain this easily – while the author function of Ern has been suppressed, there is someone else operating in the stolen (or borrowed) space inside him, whose ability to write is definitely not compromised in such a fashion. At one point in the text, we learn that an old trick for hiding a weapon or a secret in a book is to hollow it out and place something within it; Ern definitely seems to be a type of book in the logic of the text, concealing something inside himself. Luckily, our cast of characters is fairly small, probably limiting our possibilities to Conrad, Cob, Colette, Cob’s girlfriend, or the suicidal, unseen matriarch of the family as potential personalities hidden inside Ern (if we take the cross-dressing in Shakespeare and in the movie Ern watches on the bus seriously). Bollen also notes:
653
654>3. Smithe insists that we won't understand anything if we don't understand that he's a kid stuck with a middle-aged man's body and memories. But as far as I can see he invariably acts, speaks [and] thinks like a middle-aged man, not a kid.
655
656In *The Wizard Knight*, Able kept making much the same claim, for, at least as far as I believe, very good thematic reasons. However, what are we to do with that statement here? Certainly, Ern might only be three years old – the same amount of time that has elapsed since Colette was last in her Edenic waterfall setting with some beau or other. Coincidence? Not in a Wolfe book, surely. Something happened three years before the start of the novel, at about the time that Colette’s mother died. Is Ern’s deceptive youthfulness inside a point in the direction of Conrad, Jr., rather than Conrad, Sr.?
657
658Bollen continues:
659
660>4. The ending. Smithe's deal with Colette seems stupidly fragile. She's a murderess; only he knows her secret. She has every reason and wide-open opportunities to have him bumped off, with almost no risk. If she still wants a Smithe, presumably there are other clones around, or she could get another one made.
661
662>If he leaves behind a story, what risk for her in that? The very act of writing would seem to mark him as defective; whatever he produces easily dismissed as the fiction of a defective mystery-writing clone, with no legal status.
663
664Perhaps it is Ern’s ability to write which makes him special; whether Colette understands that the reclone she has checked out is unique or not is still up for some debate. This may be tied in with the strange fact that Ern just abandons Arabella in Colette’s house, as Bollen also notices:
665
666>5. The ending. So he just leaves the Arabella-clone sleeping in the house of a murderess who has no reason to care about her, without including anything about her in the deal, without even a good-bye word or apparently another thought. I just don't get it. Making sexy-times with her for the first time in 137 years was enough to get her out of his system??
667
668Bollen also expresses some concern that Dane van Petten will eventually be missed, and that the involvement of Chick Bantz will also lead any inquiries directly to the Coldbrook residence, stirring up dirt. In addition, the question of how Conrad, Sr., could afford his immense space-warping set-up on tip sheets should certainly be considered – what came first, the fortune or the technology? Ern’s return to the library also seems to be a matter of unclear motivation, given his money and his ability to coerce more out of Colette, along with an application for faking identification. Bollen speculates that this is merely a matter of compulsion or programming:
669
670>Maybe it's significant then that in the end he allows himself to be a little overdue - a small victory against the programming? Maybe related to his ability now to write?
671
672>What does he need money for, if he's just going to head back to the library? Maybe there's an easy answer to that one also: to bribe librarians and/or Electric Bill - perhaps that way he can get an Arabella installed there! […]
673
674>Anyway, if there's a hidden story to be reconstructed, I think it revolves around the mysterious Conrad Sr, his money and his rather mysterious wife. Why was he gone for 6+ months - surely not digging for emeralds the whole time?
675
676Obviously, Bollen’s concerns are not the only discussion points raised on the Urth List. On December 11th, 2015, Robert Pirkola suggested that Smithe’s name should be considered as denoting “one who strikes.” Equating Ern with the word earnest, he extrapolates that Ern Smithe’s name means “the true one who strikes, or, the real murderer of Conrad Coldbrook, Sr.” We shall return to this idea soon, but it is worth noting that a few days previously, on December 9th, 2015, Greg Kurzawa also brought up an excellent point regarding Ern’s name: 
677
678> Ern is a strange name. It sounds just like 'urn,' which is a receptacle for the ashes of the deceased. Early in the book, Ern has a conversation with Colette in which he details a few methods of hiding various things in books. Because Ern is himself a 'book,' and his name is practically a dead giveaway he is a receptacle for things (urn), I have to assume something's been hidden in him.
679
680> Near the end of the book, Arabella Lee finds a book of poems in Conrad Coldbrook's library by Clark Ashton Smith, and she reads to him the opening lines of "The Hashish Eater -or- the Apocalypse of Evil."
681
682> The fact that Ern A. Smithe and Clark Ashton Smith share a middle initial and a last name (almost) must mean something. More intriguing is that urns (Ern) are made to hold ashes (Ashton). That's too hard for me to ignore. Is it too much of a leap to assume that Ern's middle name is Ashton? Which would mean that there is, literally, an Ashton inside Ern (Ashton) Smith?
683
684> Arabella asks Ern if he likes the poem, and he writes: "I do not, but those lines are still stuck in my brain; probably you can guess why."
685
686> My tentative guess is that they're stuck in his brain because he wrote them.
687
688> Am I crazy?
689
690> Also interesting to note is that Clark Ashton Smith married a woman named Carol (Colette's middle name, and her mother's maiden name, lacking only that pesky 'e' which pops up all over the place!)
691
692My response to this line of inquiry involves the credibility and integrity of the world Wolfe posits. I don’t think in this novel Wolfe ever becomes overtly metafictional in the sense of actually taking a character and making them into Clark Ashton Smith, a real author who could never have been “scanned” in such a fashion according to the timeline of Wolfe’s future history. Dickens, after all, is explicitly mentioned as someone whose mind has been lost. However, the possibility that Smithe might be a literary forgery, either wholesale or in part (i.e.- someone else wrote *Murder on Mars* in his style for *some* purpose), might be worth considering. Additionally, the possibility that an urn contains something which has passed away seems very right, but it is, at least in my sensibilities, more related to the characters and plot of the novel rather than to an extremely literal rebirth for Clark Ashton Smith. Given Coldbrook’s possible affection for Clark Ashton Smith, we might suppose that he might forge an entire author, basing him in some small part on one of his literary interests. Arabella Lee, too, has a name suggestive of another literary allusion. Edgar Allen Poe published the poem Anabelle Lee in 1849, and its text involves a killing chill that separates lovers – though they are still intrinsically connected:
693
694>It was many and many a year ago,
695
696>   In a kingdom by the sea,
697
698>That a maiden there lived whom you may know 
699
700>   By the name of Annabel Lee; 
701
702>And this maiden she lived with no other thought 
703
704>   Than to love and be loved by me.
705
706
707>*I* was a child and *she* was a child,
708
709>   In this kingdom by the sea,
710
711>But we loved with a love that was more than love—
712
713>   I and my Annabel Lee—
714
715>With a love that the wingèd seraphs of Heaven
716
717>   Coveted her and me.
718
719
720>And this was the reason that, long ago,
721
722>   In this kingdom by the sea,
723
724>A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling 
725
726>   My beautiful Annabel Lee;
727
728>So that her highborn kinsmen came 
729
730>   And bore her away from me,
731
732>To shut her up in a sepulchre 
733
734>   In this kingdom by the sea.
735
736
737>The angels, not half so happy in Heaven,
738
739>   Went envying her and me—
740
741>Yes!—that was the reason (as all men know,
742
743>   In this kingdom by the sea)
744
745>That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
746
747>   Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.
748
749
750>But our love it was stronger by far than the love 
751
752>   Of those who were older than we—
753
754>   Of many far wiser than we—
755
756>And neither the angels in Heaven above 
757
758>   Nor the demons down under the sea 
759
760>Can ever dissever my soul from the soul 
761
762>   Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; 
763
764We should also note that in this poem the narrator and his love are referred to as children, who might still be joined even in death. Ern, too, calls himself a child. We shall return to some possible applications of this idea below.
765
766The Urth List was not done with *A Borrowed Man* by any stretch after these comments. On December 15th of 2015, Greg Kurzawa cogently dissected Ern’s conviction that it was time to be Puss in Boots and help Colette:
767
768>In the Puss in Boots story, the Marquis of Carabas was a low-born fraud. Puss, using deceit and trickery, gets him married to the son of a king. To me, this is a dead giveaway that Colette is not who she says she is. The girl we know as Colette is a low-born fraud. We know that Conrad Coldbrook Jr. ("Cob") had a fiancée, but we're not told anything about her. Could this fiancée be the girl pretending to be Colette throughout the entire book? She's included in the family painting in the sunroom, but who's to say this isn't Cob and his fiancée, rather than Cob and his sister? They are holding hands, after all. And Conrad Sr. has one hand on his wife's shoulder, an another on his son's, almost as if to declare, 'these are mine. The girl ... not so much. 
769
770Given the presence of Swan-n-Sweetheart poured into hot chocolate by Chick Bantz, we should remember that sometimes Wolfe’s closure is provided symbolically and allegorically. However, this can make even simple scenes potentially perplexing. On Christmas of 2015, Antonio Pedro Marques remarked:
771
772>Who was it said *A Borrowed Man* was straightforward? I've just finished it and it reads even more mystifying than is usual with a Wolfe novel. The normal thing is to have some fantastic setting and a convoluted story, here we have a relatively banal setting with a story in which nothing adds up. …
773
774>- No credible reason is presented for [Cob’s] murder, whoever did it.
775
776We can suppose that one possible reason might involve an incestuous relationship between Cob and Colette. However, another possibility exists, and that involves the genre of *Murder on Mars*. It is called a “fantasy murder” at one point. In a world in which reclones can be produced, it seems possible that someone might even be able to fake his or her own death with a suitable reclone to take the place of the body. That means that in the world of *A Borrowed Man*, even the murdered person is not above suspicion in committing the crime: a suitable and identical corpse might easily be created. However, there is almost no text to support this reading. Could Cob really have faked his own death in such a fashion? To what purpose, beyond forging a new identity to be with his sister (or … inheritance tax evasion)?
777
778Marques also considers one of the biggest mysteries of the text:
779
780>- [Cob] returned from the jungle through the window. Why isn't the window an option for anyone else?
781
782>- If not the jungle, where did [Colette Coldbrook] and whoever else go/hide when [Smithe] entered the mansion?
783
784>- The jungle's door wasn't locked when [Smithe] returned through it. The assumption is that someone has recently gone through (the door locks after a while), though later on it would appear that it has to be explicitly locked, which would mean whoever came out didn't have the opportunity to lock it (if not always needed, why have a lock at all?)
785
786The text makes clear that the first case is normally how the door functions – the door has to be explicitly unlocked, after which it locks on its own after about two minutes. Ern’s return from that faraway place is a real textual problem unless someone immediately preceded him through the door, returning to the house. There might be one or two other explanations which we shall work through below. Marques also notes that “[Smithe’s] unusual strength is simply glossed over. He beat up the stranger in the bus as if it were nothing, he tore down a wall when imprisoned... that just makes no sense.”
787
788It could very well be that Smithe has been augmented in very particular ways, though to be fair (or not), he sucker-punches the man on the bus first and then brutally capitalizes upon the situation. From what might or might not be personal experience, I can testify that some walls are easier to kick through than others. Oddly, that man on the bus is beaten up already, just as Ern might appear after being tortured by Payne and Fish. Might something even stranger and more metaphorical have occurred in this scene, in which a man resembling Ern is sitting in his seat, to be brutally beaten by our narrator and thrown to the back of the bus? We should keep in mind that one of Colette’s final description of Conrad, Sr., calls him “truly savage when he was angry … and he held grudges” (291). Of course, she ends this with the claim that Ern did not know him, but perhaps Ern’s very origin is tied up in Conrad, Sr., somehow. Might an internal struggle for control of a body be depicted in such a fashion, with a brutal beating, almost like a cinematic exposition of a mental conflict?
789
790In a post from December 30th, 2015, Robert Pirkola endorses the possibility that perhaps Conrad, Sr., might not be happy that Cob could be marrying someone from a lower socio-economic stratum; Pirkola identifies Cob’s uncertain sweetheart as Ella-Jean, “who may have been involved in intrigues that ultimately displeased the rage-filled [Conrad, Sr.,] to the point of murdering Cob.”
791
792Pirkola suspects something about the manner in which Cob visited Colette, taking a commercial flight from New Delphi to Spice Grove:
793
794>Why would he travel this way when he had Canary at his disposal? Also, we know there are no direct commercial flights between Owenbright and New Delphi, [(Wolfe 202).] One would need to get a connection through Niagara [(203).] Is it likely that there are direct commercial flights between Spice Grove and New Delphi?
795
796For whatever reason, the text makes clear at the end that a truly wealthy person would take a commercial flight rather than driving themselves from Spice Grove to New Delphi, though this could be spurious reasoning on Ern’s part. Pirkola and I agree that the easiest assumption to make regarding Cob’s return from the fourth-floor window is that he never entered the jungle room at all. However, if we are to believe, as Colette suggests, that she received the book on the same day that Cob died, then she, too, was present in New Delphi that day – unless Cob was visiting someone else. As far as where Colette might have hidden when Smithe returned to the house, Pirkola supposes:
797
798>They could well have left in a flitter owned by [Dane van Petten] as suggested by [Georges]. [Colette] rented Maxette in Owenbright and drove herself to New Delphi […]. She would have rented it on Day 2 of the narrative and had until Day 7 to get there. […] This would mean that [Colette] and [Smithe] took the red flitter to their meeting with Dr. Roglich, even though it is never specifically mentioned. This is contradicted by [Ern,] who later says that [Colette] "was afraid to return to her apartment building in Spice Grove to get her flitter" [(255).] The last we saw the red flitter it was at Coldbrook Mansion, [(52).] How could it have gotten back to her apartment?  [Dane van Petten] probably flew it back from Owenbright. In any event, [Dane] and [Colette] are flitting around in it when [Colette] shows up at the New Delphi bus terminal … and it is how they get from there back to the Coldbrook Mansion […].
799
800I am only going to interject that it seems that there is a missing day between the time that we last see Colette’s flitter and the meeting with Roglich, perhaps giving her time to return to her apartment and then for them to take a commercial flight to meet Dr. Roglich. While the vehicles are important, I don’t want to get bogged down in thinking about them too much beyond their symbolic implications. It is clear that they take a cab from Roglich’s office to the hotel, so it is doubtful that they arrived in the red flitter (85). Regarding the door, Pirkola speculates:
801
802> - The jungle's door wasn't locked when [Smithe] returned through it. The assumption is that someone has recently gone through (the door locks after a while), though later on it would appear that it has to be explicitly locked, which would mean whoever came out didn't have the opportunity to lock it (if not always needed, why have a lock at all?).
803
804[It seems pretty clear that the door locks on its own when Ern takes Dane through, after a short period of time.] Pirkola continues:
805
806>It is possible that someone was in there just before him. The only possibilities are [Georges], [Mahala], [Colette], and [Dane]. But it would necessitate a second key because *Murder on Mars* was in the library when [Smithe] was first encountering the Jungle Room [(180).] [Georges] and [Mahala] would have had no way of knowing where it was hidden.
807
808In a world of reclones and people potentially in disguise, there are some other shadowy figures who might be hiding behind that door, including Conrad (Jr. or Sr.), his supposedly deceased wife, or even, if we want to really read into what Payne and Fish were suggesting, a Colette whom the Colette we know is merely imitating. Alas, this reeks of “conspiracy theory,” so let’s return to Pirkola’s thoughts on a second card:
809
810> [Smithe] did have a regular card to the Coldbrook Mansion, however. It was left behind at the Owenbright hotel in [Colette]’s shaping bag but taken by [Smithe]. [Colette] doesn't believe that the regular house card opens the [fourth] floor doors, … It does open the hangar though and she didn't know that before they tried it. … [Smithe] thinks that [Conrad, Sr.] probably had a spare card [(178).] Cob had the card for the lab on him when he died …. It seems likely that the house card in [Colette’s] shaping bag was the card that Cob had on him when he died and is in fact [Senior's] spare card.  Anyway, if she tried a key that unlocked the Jungle Room side of the door from the [fourth] floor landing, it wouldn't have permitted her entry because only unlocking the back would not allow access from the front. … Thus, she would have thought a normal card would not open the Jungle Room door when in fact it may have, just from the other side. Thus, since [Smithe] had the house card, it could have opened the Jungle Room door from the back, allowing him egress. But he knew if he wanted to go in from the front, he needed to get *Murder on Mars*, which is what he does soon after.
811
812>There is another explanation, much less involved.  When [Colette] is telling [Smithe] about Cob's visit to the Jungle Room, she shows him a switch on the lab door. She explains, "Look at this [door]. If it's locked, you have to show a card to get in; but if you're inside, you can flip this and it will let you out, then lock behind you every time it's shut"[(60).] If the Jungle Room door had such a mechanism, [Smithe] would just have had to flip it to get himself out without a key. However, this has several problems. One, [Dane] would almost certainly discover this mechanism and get himself off the Jungle Planet if it existed on the door. Two, the doors for the Reactor Room and the Jungle Room were different from the others in the house, so why retain this feature? If it were there, you would only ever need both keys when entering from the [fourth] floor landing. If you were exiting, you never would need a key. Then again, perhaps this is the answer to [Smithe’s] question, "Why do it that way?"  One would hardly want to strand oneself on a distant planet through negligence tantamount to that of locking your keys in your car.
813
814This locking mechanism is one of the central mysteries of the text, and the manner in which the window seems to be a one-way portal (maybe?) is also confounding. However, we do know from Chick’s attempts to check Ern out that he has a card that will work for the Spice Grove Library, allowing him exit. Perhaps Conrad, Sr., has engineered things (though isn’t Cob the engineer?) in such a way that Ern truly is the card which allows egress from the fantastic world. Unfortunately, his card doesn’t seem to work on the entrance. As with several features of Wolfe’s later novels, the amount of guesswork necessary to come to a conclusion makes many of these speculations tentative at best. Could merely somehow *being* Conrad Coldbrook (Senior or Junior) open the door from the inside, as CONC unlocks the Cat and the Canary? 
815
816There is another symbolic moment in the text that seems to have a connotation far beyond its surface details. When Ern first meets Chick in the library, he is offered three sandwiches and a spiked drink of hot chocolate. While two of the sandwiches are eaten, he gives the third away to a voracious looking onlooker and then goes to see Arabella staring off into space. This prompts Ern to think about moving her thoughts themselves. By the end of the book, Ern will have met three Arabellas. He will leave the third with a clearly greedy and selfish person in Colette, and in that scene he will also see Colette staring off into space in exactly the same fashion Arabella did earlier. This strange allegorical mapping of Arabella onto the sandwiches might also have another symbolic function. Perhaps the reclones are part of a plan: one opens the back of the door, while the other can open the front. If it is not their person which holds the secret, perhaps it is the keys they hold, which allows Ern and Arabella to leave their respective libraries. Thus, Ern could always leave that far world but might not be able to enter it, while Arabella could enter it, but might be in danger of getting trapped there. The reclones would sandwich the locking door like the front and back covers of the book. The hot and cold imagery of Arabella and Colette might even suggest a further relationship between them, which we shall put aside momentarily.
817
818On March 30th, 2016, Paul Rydeen of the Urth Mailing List also notes his preoccupation with the strange door:
819
820>[T]he primary question I have concerns the mistakes Ern makes in describing access to and from the room where the other planet is said to be. The first time Ern encounters the room, he climbs in through the window and leaves by the door. He was following Cob, who must’ve got as far as looking in the window before turning back. Later we learn that it is impossible to leave the room without a card key, the only exception being that the door stays unlocked for two minutes after passing through it. However, the first time Ern goes through, it locks right away. So either someone just went through the door before Ern did and it was still unlocked, then the two minutes ran out and it locked (assuming that opening the door didn’t reset the timer), or else he made the account up. The latter seems to be the simpler explanation. Ern drives the point home about how the locks work on two occasions, once with Colette and once while narrating his stranding of van Petten there. He also declines to tell us why the locks work this way (a different one on each side), saying we can figure it out. I cannot think of a valid reason that would apply in this case but am open to suggestions.
821
822>Second mistake, Ern claims the book has a different card key embedded in each cover. Assuming the book is at most an inch thick, I cannot imagine the further card key being blocked by an inch of paper, especially when Ern says the steel door itself doesn’t block the signal. This is when he holds the book the wrong way and hears the opposite side’s lock click open. Yet later Georges tells him that an eephone would not work once the door was closed because the steel would block it. So this appears to be a lie on Ern’s part, since the lock signal should also be blocked by the door.
823
824>I suspect what really happened is Ern disposed of van Petten in the household incinerator. He says he’s seen an old book incinerated once, but then adds it was on a screen. (This is where he says the reclone’s leg moved as his head went into the incinerator.) We know Ern can’t use screens. Colette says the Coldbrook house has an incinerator for trash, and no one contradicts Ern when he suggests that he could be incinerated in it. This suggests it’s large enough to do so, and also that this is what Ern really did with van Petten. The household incinerator is a Chekhov’s Gun – don’t mention it if you’re not going to use it.
825
826>In fact, rereading the opening paragraph of the book with this in mind, it can be [seen] as Ern confessing to a murder he committed – the murder of van Petten, presumably. (It can also be taken as meaning the murder of Coldbrook, Sr. and/or Jr., since those led to Ern’s leverage over Colette and thus his longevity. Or all three murders.)
827
828Here, I would like to (re)state that my method of approaching Wolfe involves taking everything as either literally or symbolically true. Bald-faced lies are actually quite unusual, with inaccuracies or inconsistencies representing subjective understandings held by certain characters, even if it involves dream or delusion. Thus, the experiences of Baxter Dunn, Able, Mr. Green, and the terribly psychologically disturbed father in “The Ziggurat” are presented as true because they *are* occurring as such to the characters in the stories, even if those experiences are a kind of gnostic palimpsest, with a deeper reality peeping out from behind them. The incinerator is a symbol that is used quite heavily in the book, given its relationship to the threat of fire: humanity, thinking itself proceeding on its simple domestic path in a kind of paradise, has burnt its future and denuded life of meaning. It could very well be that the experiences through the door represent a mental struggle or delusion on the part of Ern, but I am hard-pressed to find another novel in Wolfe’s corpus, even with the most unreliable narrators, where there is not a kernel of symbolic truth in even the most seemingly unrelated detail once a holistic understanding of the text is achieved. Rydeen continues:
829
830>If I am right so far, I have to ask what was really in the locked room. Equipment for manufacturing high-quality artificial emeralds? Whatever it was, a glimpse of it through the window scared the young Cob.
831
832On April 1st, 2016, Rydeen continues with a thematic observation that is extremely pertinent: 
833
834>Something else I noticed while reading [*A Borrowed Man*] that I was reminded of while reading these [previous Urth posts] is how passive Colette was near the end of the book. It seems the marginalized humans – reclones, ex-cops, thugs, and the handicapped – display the most humanity. Hmm… recall the early Colette and how she dictated to Ern what his limits were, as opposed to how she limply went along with van Petten and how dispassionately she took the news when [van Petten’s] permanent absence was reported.
835
836>I also keep wondering why [Wolfe] substituted a shaping bag for Colette’s purse. I didn’t know what that was and neither did my wife, but I googled it and found out what the term refers to. Perhaps this is another reference to the “urn” theory, as the shaping bag folds out to a certain shape to hold its contents. It occurs to me that a Smith shapes things, too.
837
838From here, his focus shifts to the nature of the other reclones in the book:
839
840>Look at the different versions of [Arabella]. The first was angry with Ern but the second couldn’t keep her hands off of him. Why the difference, if they were imprinted with the same brain scans after cloning? […]
841
842If Ern’s creation has somehow been influenced by the loss of Senior’s wife, then perhaps Arabella, too, contains fragments. The dropping of the contentious book into a laundry chute to conceal it and its later placement in Colette’s symbolically interesting robe implies a kind of washing. Is Conrad trying to recreate his own wife, scrubbed free of her congenital or environmental death wish? One of the things which I hope these analyses have emphasized is that somehow *everything* is true in Wolfe one way or another, literally or metaphorically. Thus, while the travel to another world might not be as Ern understands it, he experienced something like what he described, even if it is metaphorically transformed. I find the most difficult assertion in the text to reconcile involves the death of Conrad, Sr., before Cob in the initial story Colette tells – could it be that somehow Conrad died both before *and* after his son? Ern does follow in the footsteps of Cob in climbing up the building and in putting on his clothes – could it be that the personality he stores is actually not predicated upon the father? Colette claims that after her father died, Cob dropped the “Junior” designation.
843
844Rydeen expresses some concern over the police report and the manner in which Georges and Ern are easily placated in obtaining information about Cob’s death when they originally sought out information about his father. On April 5th, 2016, Robert Pirkola responds:
845
846>What was in the police report? We know only one little detail: The police report says that the maid ‘bot found the body and told [Senior] when “he got back” [(247).] But elsewhere the maid 'bot says [Senior] purchased it shortly before Cob's death, a fact which "jolted" [Smithe]. When you start thinking about how this could be significant, things get knotty right quick. […] Okay, so what? Well where had [Senior] gotten back from as related in the police report? Was he still supposed to be missing at this time? So we have to unravel all the stories about the timing of [Senior’s] return and there are several. Just as an example, Cob is supposed to have visited [Colette] after opening the safe to give her *Murder on Mars* [(34).] While Cob is with [Colette] (and thus away from the Coldbrook Mansion) [Senior] screens [her], supposedly just after getting back from his disappearance [(290-1).] Then she goes to Coldbrook Mansion to try and smooth things over between Cob and [Senior] (over the whole safe/selling emeralds thing), leaving Cob in Spice Grove. Cob calls [Colette] and [Colette] begs him not to come back to Coldbrook Mansion, but Cob defies this request, returns, and is supposedly strangled while walking in the front door [(291).] Thus, [Colette’s] story from the end of the book is that [Senior] had returned before Cob's murder because [he] was in fact the murderer. But the police report, written shortly after the discovery of the body, contradicts this, implying that [Senior] had not returned until after Cob's body was discovered. [Colette] questioned the maid 'bot after the murder and could have programmed it to change its story on this detail. “If it’s what they were programmed to do, they think it’s perfectly fine no matter what the situation is” [(70).] This thread could be pulled at more, but I think the police report's contradiction is certainly significant.
847
848These are excellent points (though of course the timing of the ‘bot’s purchase is significant to Ern because it implies that Senior was very much alive and active in the household right before the death of Cob, when he should already have been dead, according to Colette.) Ern is consistent in his errors about authorship, as we shall discuss below, and perhaps his conclusions at the end of the novel are also simply wrong. Dane, Dr. Roglich, Conrad, Sr., and perhaps even Conrad, Jr., might have the strength of hand necessary to strangle either the original Cob or a reclone in the hallway. While it is unlikely unless Georges and Mahala are already working for Dane or Colette (which would provide her a reason for visiting the bus station), then even Georges might be a possibility here.
849
850On the 18th of April, 2016, Paul Rydeen continues some of the speculation on the Urth List, admitting that the family photo might be indicative of a stronger relationship between Cob and Colette, and he also attempts to explain the divergent behavior of the various Arabella clones in the text:
851
852>Maybe the different behavior from reclones with the same origin underlines what Ern was saying about himself not really being Ern. He's a clone of someone with Ern's memories imprinted on him, limited by certain behavioral restrictions.
853
854Rather than representing memories from an original body, I think that the verbal relationship between Ern and urn and his subconscious tendencies indicate that he is a book in which a secret has been hidden – most likely a fragment of a different personality, as is one of Wolfe’s most consistent tropes. Given the brain scans and the possibility of viewing into the minds of others, as Colette describes at the start, it is not hard to imagine that some wealthy or devious individual has planted a fragment of someone else inside him, free from the restrictions which normally bind reclones, but not always at the forefront of Ern’s mind.
855
856More in line with this thinking, on April 15th, 2016, Greg Kurzawa notes:
857
858>So I picked up the G. K. Chesterton Collection ebook for 99 cents from Amazon, which contains most (if not everything) the man ever wrote. In the collection is an essay on [*The Mystery of Edwin Drood*], a Dickens novel which I recently read because of the reference to it in [*A Borrowed Man.*] The essay was good, and I'd like to quote some of it. […]
859
860>In my mind, the strongest connection [between *A Borrowed Man* and *The Mystery of Drood*] are the similarities between Edwin Drood and "Cob" Coldbrook. Both were young engineers, soon to be married, strangled to death by a father or father figure. Near the final chapters of "The Mystery of Edwin Drood," a strange new character named Datchery shows up in town and starts sleuthing around, and the question of the day is: who is this Datchery, really?
861
862>From Chesterton's essay: "That ingenious writer, Mr. Proctor, started the highly plausible theory that this Datchery was Drood himself, who had not really been killed … This argument has been quite perfectly summed up ... in one sentence: 'If Edwin Drood is dead, there is not much mystery about him.' … It certainly seems artistically more likely that there was a *further* mystery of Edwin Drood; not the mystery that he was murdered, but the mystery that he was *not* murdered." …
863
864>We know Wolfe has read both Dickens and Chesterton. I don't find it hard to believe that he's read this very essay of Chesterton's, or that he "borrowed" the unresolved scenario presented in [*The Mystery of Edwin Drood*] and spun it his own unique way.
865
866>And that makes me wonder, is "Cob" Coldbrook really dead? And if he isn't, is he (possibly like Datchery in [*The Mystery of Edwin Drood*]) masquerading as another character?
867
868If it is Cob who survives somehow after the death of his father, then the conditions for every scenario being somehow true as presented in *A Borrowed Man* are actually met: he would have somehow “died” both before and after Conrad, Sr., turning some of Colette’s lie into truth. I eventually chimed in with an inquiry into one more thematically important error Ern makes, written on April 29th, 2017. [Remember this day of the month– there are no coincidences.]
869
870>When Ms. Coldbrook disappears from their hotel room, Ern goes and checks himself into Owenbright Library (though in the next chapter he calls it Owenlight Library) and meets up with the reclone of his ex-wife. There are two interesting literary misattributions here. One relates wit and madness, and the supposition is offered that Shakespeare said it. It is actually Dryden.
871
872>[When Ern meets Chick Bantz and considers why food might not be purchased for reclones by library guests, he thinks of] the youthful talented boy who choked on a sweet roll mentioned by Dr. Johnson. The youthful prodigy of literature contemporary with Dr. Johnson would have been the somewhat unethical but no doubt ingenious forger Thomas Chatterton, who killed himself at [the age of seventeen] with arsenic. Two inaccurate quotes in the space of two pages also follows another lie: he tells Arabella that he has been checked out for forty days and nights, only to admit that he was lying a few pages later. ([Forty] days and nights are usually the length of time assigned to a trial and temptation from a biblical perspective, but this is not limited to the story of Jesus in the wilderness). […]
873
874>Are these errors in literary references, one of which is probably to an infamous and extremely talented forger, who killed himself through poison rather than choking, related to the text? (Note that [presumably] Conrad, Sr., was poisoned by Colette, while Cob was choked by his father, supposedly *after* his father’s funeral - though Ern is careful to say that the murder of a son by a father is the least likely murder scenario possible.) Also, Colette's earlier story indicates that her brother got the majority of the property inheritance but decided to split it, since he was the favored child ... [Is this] all fabrication?
875 
876The unnamed but probable allusion to Chatterton (1752-1770) raises all kinds of interesting thematic possibilities, since he claimed to have discovered poems from antiquity which he himself was writing, using an archaic style. Even more oddly, according to psychoanalyst Louise Kaplan, Chatterton’s inspiration may have been in part related to the absence of a father figure in his life, inspiring him to “reconstitute the lost father in fantasy” (100). The next day on the Urth Mailing List, Mo Holkar mentions that Ern Smithe might be a reference to the literary hoax identity, Ern Malley. (Malley and his entire corpus were created by two authors who intentionally wrote bad poetry in order to sucker a Modernist magazine. The publisher was even put on trial for publishing obscene material.)
877
878Even though I made the observation about Chatterton on April 29th, I did not find the following excerpt from *The Life of Johnson* concerning the young Chatterton and his forged poetry until April 30th:
879
880>On Monday, April 29, he and I made an excursion to Bristol, where I was entertained with seeing him enquire upon the spot, into the authenticity of "Rowley's Poetry," as I had seen him enquire upon the spot into the authenticity of "Ossian's Poetry." George Catcot, the pewterer, who was as zealous for Rowley, as Dr. Hugh Blair was for Ossian, (I trust my Reverend friend will excuse the comparison,) attended us at our inn, and with a triumphant air of lively simplicity called out, "I'll make Dr. Johnson a convert." Dr. Johnson, at his desire, read aloud some of Chatterton's fabricated verses, while Catcot stood at the back of his chair, moving himself like a pendulum, and beating time with his feet, and now and then looking into Dr. Johnson's face, wondering that he was not yet convinced. We called on Mr. Barret, the surgeon, and saw some of the "originals" as they were called, which were executed very artificially; but from a careful inspection of them, and a consideration of the circumstances with which they were attended, we were quite satisfied of the imposture, which, indeed, has been clearly demonstrated from internal evidence, by several able criticks.
881
882>Honest Catcot seemed to pay no attention whatever to any objections, but insisted, as an end to all controversy, that we should go with him to the tower of the church in Redcliff, and "view with our own eyes" the ancient chest in which the manuscripts were found. To this, Dr. Johnson good-naturedly agreed; and though troubled with a shortness of breathing, laboured up a long flight of steps, till we came to the place where the wondrous chest stood. "There, (said Catcot, with a bouncing confident credulity,) there is the very chest itself." After this ocular demonstration, there was no more to be said. He brought to my recollection a Scotch Highlander, a man of learning too, and who had seen the world, attesting, and at the same time giving his reasons for the authenticity of Fingal: — "I have heard all the poem when I was young." — "Have you, Sir? Pray what have you heard?" — "I have heard Ossian, Oscar, and every one of them."
883
884>Johnson said of Chatterton, "This is the most extraordinary young man that has encountered my knowledge. It is wonderful how the whelp has written such things."
885
886>We were by no means pleased with our inn at Bristol. "Let us see now, (said I,) how we should describe it." Johnson was ready with his raillery. "Describe it, Sir? — Why, it was so bad that Boswell wished to be in Scotland!"
887
888If Wolfe indeed invokes Chatterton in this portion of the text, a forger who poisoned himself, then what does this ultimately imply about Ern Smithe, and should we attribute the act of forgery to Conrad, Sr., or to the young Cob? Now, let us leave these speculations behind for a few other salient features of the text.
889
890## A Further Secret
891
892While the first chapter goes to great lengths to discuss how something might be hidden in a book, perhaps some of what Wolfe makes explicit here has nothing to do with the secrets of Colette and Ern. After Dane van Petten and his “boss” beat and subdue them, Ern has a sinister dream. He falls asleep:
893
894>Only to dream about wrestling a monster with a man’s head at one end and an ape’s at the other end, and one hell of a lot of arms. This desperate struggle was in a grave thinly disguised as a wormhole through Mars. A wormhole that was already starting to flood. I guess they have a lot of water on Mars, when you are dreaming.
895
896>When I woke up it was nearly morning and I was soaked with sweat. (Wolfe 50)
897
898Those who have not yet read *The Book of the Short Sun* are advised to take two actions: 1) skip to the last paragraph in this section; 2) go read *Short Sun* a few times.
899
900Many readers have found my mapping of Verthandi/Mars and Urth onto Blue and Green respectively in *The Book of the Short Sun* to be implausible, despite the thematically resonant story of Spring Wind (Mars) being born from the union of a tree and his mother in “The Tale of the Boy Called Frog.” Wolfe leaves scant evidence that Blue could be Mars, save for a wonderfully obscure passage in which Horn’s son relates that once he watched a red leech attack a green frog, leaving only the corpse of the frog behind. Blue serves as the largest red herring in Wolfe’s body of work, but we should never forget that the animal with the most resonance for Mars is the wolf. Here, the many armed beings and a flooded Mars are the most explicit link to the many armed life-forms on Blue which might be inspired by Edgar Rice Burrough’s own treatment of Mars. In Wolfe’s dreams, Mars certainly was covered in blue water.
901
902Of more pressing note for *A Borrowed Man* is the idea that Mars is a grave filling with water. Given the watery imagery associated with the Coldbrook name and the possibility that fragments of an individual might be acting as “arms,” then perhaps we should consider that personalities such as Conrad or even his wife might not be limited to their own original bodies, with the ability to manipulate things beyond normal human limitations – perhaps even beyond death.
903
904## The Metaphor of Names and Symbols
905
906I have always argued that Wolfe is a symbolist who creates almost subconscious patterns within texts that reflect on larger plot elements. One of the most blatantly impossible moments of *A Borrowed Man*, when Ern figures out almost *a priori* that Georges Fevre is actually an ex-cop named George Franklin, might serve as another moment of synecdoche that reflects on a greater plot issue in the text. The name Georges implies a farmer or a tiller in soil, but, perhaps more importantly, the French name Fevres denotes a blacksmith. This is eerily similar to Smithe’s last name. This “assumed” identity covers Georges’s “true” name, which, somehow, Ern discovers is Franklin, an occupation implying a “freeborn landowner.” So … a landowner has disguised himself as a [S]mith[e]. While this may not be definitive, it might help contextualize some of the things which Smithe is most reluctant to discuss, especially considering that another moment that seems ultimately confusing involves the giant beaked creature whose lumps split into smaller portions to pursue Smithe down the beach. Could fragments of individuals (note that the creature is referred to as a “mother”) be acting in the text?
907
908Of course, Georges Fevre’s name is not the only possibly metaphorical one. His mate, the mute Mahala Levy, has a name which might have multiple meanings. From the Native American tradition, Mahala may mean simply “woman,” but its Hebrew origin implies “tender.” The Hebrew meaning of Levy can mean “joining.” (Its Irish derivation from Donlevy can imply “brown mountain,” but the Hebrew denotation seems most likely.) A “tender joining” which does not speak with its own voice but with the voice of various computer monitors and through writing might be the most likely implication of her name, but it is still possible that the last name Levy truly reflects the word levy – the imposition of a tax on something, joined as she is with a cop in disguise. This might indicate that she and Georges are more involved with Dane van Petten, the tax collector, than it first seems. Given that Georges knows something about the tip sheets that Conrad, Sr., supposedly used to kick-start his fortune, is this enough of a connection to imply some motive in eliminating the Coldbrook family in an attempt to gain their wealth?
909
910The question remains: are Georges and Mahala whom they appear to be, or does this naming reflect more on the mystery of Ern Smithe’s identity? Given that Mr. Coldbrook’s poetic interests included Clarke Ashton Smith, might he have, Chatterton style, forged an entire identity and then bequeathed it with a fragment of either himself or his wife? Did he in fact make his initial money by writing detective stories under a pseudonym, creating an entirely false shell to further some of his ultimate ends? Creating an entirely false author from antiquity seems a bit more challenging even in a world with hackers than in Chatterton’s time. It is more likely that *Murder on Mars* is a forgery designed for an explicit purpose, like a key that awakens something planted in Ern’s unconscious. What, then of Ern’s original memories and writings, and the claim that he actually does seem to have “fans” who have read his other work? [Of course, the one definite fan we meet is suspicious, making up one half of the Payne and Fish duo, who are absent from our list of names at the end.] While Smithe might certainly be forged, it seems far more likely that only *Murder on Mars* is false.
911
912Beyond the human names, we have the vehicle names: Geraldine, Maxette, the Cat, and the Canary. Of course, there is the old saying involving the cat that ate the canary, but do the other vehicle names tell us anything? While Geraldine can mean “one who rules with a spear,” it is also the name of the female alter ego of the male comedian Flip Wilson, who lived from 1933-1998. The character of Geraldine had several catchphrases which have entered the popular consciousness, but she also spoke of her unseen boyfriend named “Killer.” Combined with Chick’s feminine descriptors and the entertainment Ern watches on the bus in which the male is dressed as the female and the female as the male, can we draw any conclusions about any hidden identities within our cast? Also, while the cat and the canary is suggestive of Conrad, Sr., killing Cob, it might also signify the entrance of Cob into his father’s plans, unwelcome, smuggling something into Ern Smithe.
913
914The book itself, *Murder on Mars*, has an abbreviation which might be suggestive: MOM. Given Cob’s engineering background, is it at all possible that he is in fact the individual who wrote the book, and that Colette rifled through his bag for a book which he never gave to her rather than for money? Was his plan to resurrect his mother in the most convoluted of fashions? Given the time that Payne and Fish spend asking about the appearance of Colette’s mother, she seems more important to the plot than we might otherwise guess. The book’s hiding places might also be thematically important. Besides lying in a safe until it is supposedly discovered by Cob (though it pains me to say it, how reliable is Colette?), it is also hidden on a shelf in Conrad’s library, concealed in a dead log on the beach, and, for a very brief time, in the laundry chute at Taos Towers. By the end, Ern sincerely wishes that he had buried it on the beach of another world.
915
916When Ern retrieves it from the laundry chute near the start of the novel, he hides it in the pocket of Colette’s robe. That robe has white roses and purple morning glories on it (48). Morning glories are associated with love - sometimes with a restricted love. A resonant story in Chinese culture tells of two lovers so obsessed with one another that the gods limited their meetings to once per year (just as Ern asks Colette to check him out, from here on out). The tragedy and sorrow of love in vain is also invoked. White roses can symbolize purity and there is even some association with Mary and the Rose of Heaven. Perhaps these symbols are somehow relevant to the plot.
917
918However, we are still uncertain if it is Conrad, Sr., Cob, or Joanne Rebecca Carole who might be concealed, either in Ern or in Arabella. Just as the book was hidden on the shelf of a library in an elided scene by Ern, perhaps the secret Conrad or his son has hidden is also similarly concealed on the shelf of a library. The off-screen hiding of the book holding a strange secret is perhaps a pattern which can be applied to the text as a whole.
919
920Finally, we have a pattern of misnaming and misidentification on the part of Ern which would seem to be highly suggestive of his misunderstanding of the “authorship” or the “orchestrating force” at work. When Arabella insists that fighting would be preferable to depression, and quotes, “Great wit is unto madness near allied,” Ern suggests that it is a quotation from Shakespeare, though in fact it is from John Dryden. Later, he will think of Shakespeare again when he is on a bus heading back to New Delphi, and it is in terms of cross-dressing. Is Chick Bantz actually a character like Colette’s mother in disguise, or is he or she a further indication that there is some sense in which a female character might be disguised as a male, meant to be applied to the text but not specifically to Chick? Perhaps some other disjunctions within the novel might help us advance a few plausible explanations.
921
922## The Fracture Points
923
924There is one vitally important detail that seems inescapable: Ern does not remember anything about *Murder on Mars* until he reads a passage from it. Only after he reads a passage will he say, “Talking mostly to myself … ‘I remember it now’” (32). Perhaps this might have been mere forgetfulness on Ern’s part, dismissing a minor work, but later, when he is interrogated by Payne and Fish, they also fail to find the book: “No book. Nowhere. Nobody’s even heard of it. He’s stringin’ us” (135). This is the first fracture point of *A Borrowed Man*; usually, Wolfe’s first chapters reveal something important regarding the subtext he is developing. In this first chapter, Ern and Colette discuss how something might be hidden in a book, talking about disappearing ink triggered by heat that then disappears when cooled, textual alterations, changes between editions, and even something planted in a physical copy. In our surface reading, it seems that the cards in the edition that Conrad, Sr., kept represented the physical secret to the book, but we might very well have supposed that in this case, the true book being checked out of the library is Ern A. Smithe. Does *Murder on Mars* awaken another fragment inside him? If so, is it truly submerged or is it ever brought to the surface? From this point forward, there does seem to be a very subtle double nature in Ern’s consciousness, such as when he acts to defend Colette from the assault in her apartment and risks bodily harm to himself, acknowledging that someone else was acting there: “Somebody jumped his back and got an arm around his neck. … I said ‘somebody’ because I cannot remember deciding to do it. I cannot remember doing it, either, but I know somebody did. Somebody, not me” (44). Also, at certain key points Ern seems to avoid speaking so that he will not give voice to a lie, and these moments are sometimes related to discussing the fates of Colette’s family members.
925
926Given such little evidence for *Murder on Mars* save for the memories which suspiciously and suddenly spring up after reading a passage (after all, Payne and Fish *should* be able to find some record of it), then where did it come from? The conversation Ern and Colette have with Dr. Roglich reiterates that nothing appears from nowhere (or something like that). It also makes a metaphor of transporting space from one place to another and the resulting drop in temperature this causes – something strangely resonant with the name Coldbrook, especially given the opening scene in which Ern bathes his feet in cool water with Colette; throughout the rest of the novel he will face the threat of burnt feet and extinction. When “hot” Arabella finally arrives, she is sure to call Ern “freezing.” The three years that have passed since Colette has been in the garden also resonate with the passing away of her mother and the coming of a human staff to the Coldbrook residence. This conversation highlights some other themes which might be pertinent. In discussing wild animals, we learn, “Some of the dangerous ones have been killed off; but they keep coming back, bears and wolves, and panthers that look like big Siamese cats” (25). Could Conrad, Sr., be one of those dangerous beings who keeps coming back? She also indicates that knowledge can have an incendiary effect, one which she attempts to pull off: “The teacher’s task is to light that fire and puff it into a blaze. … Sometimes you don’t know how hot it is until it burns you a little” (27-8). Given that Mrs. Peters daughter is also a teacher, the fact that Colette is extremely happy to see Mrs. Peters again, and the questions Payne and Fish ask about Colette and whether she might be in disguise, we might even begin to suspect that the teacher Spring Peters of Neuvo Dinero might have hatched a plan for her own financial security. Neuvo Dinero, after all, means “new money.” However, Conrad, Sr., Cob, and the presence of a robot staff would make Colette’s seamless and unremarked replacement extremely unlikely and difficult. Ern’s dream, of Colette being shoved into a book against her will, might favor the idea that something unfortunate has happened to her, however. The manner in which Ern catches her at the end of the novel staring off into space resembles something one of the Arabella reclones does – it also suggests, as Paul Rydeen noted above, that there is a passivity to her character at the end of the volume. This may not have been the case earlier. Can the introduction of the “hot” Arabella actually affect the personality of cold Colette?
927
928At the start, Colette seems interested in bringing her mother back: “Death is a horror, an atrocity, and an injustice, and I wish to heaven we could kill it, for a change. … Not what I’ve got the money, I’m going to have [my mother] recloned” (28). The question remains at the end of the novel whether Senior, Cob, or Colette herself developed some elaborate scheme to actually return their mother to a fully functioning and repaired life, somehow. 
929
930It is worth mentioning that one of the allusions which Robert Pirkola mentioned on the Urth list is to Colette’s mother’s name: Joanne Rebecca Carole Coldbrook. The 1940 film *Rebecca* has some potentially disturbing resonance with the plot of *A Borrowed Man*. In that film, a young girl meets and quickly marries an aristocratic man named Maxim de Winter whose first wife, Rebecca, seems to have passed away. The housekeeper treats the new Mrs. de Winter badly and indicates that she is a poor comparison to the old lady of the house. At a costume party in which she wears the same outfit Rebecca did the year before, the young wife is almost talked into killing herself by the housekeeper. In a strange twist, it turns out that the titular character, Rebecca, did not die in the manner her husband indicated. He misidentified another body as hers, but her true corpse is soon found. Her husband confesses that their marriage was troubled, and that Rebecca told him she was pregnant with another man’s child. The ensuing argument resulted in her death, after which he hid her body in a boat. As it turns out, his wife had taken a clandestine visit to a doctor. When the authorities meet with him, the doctor reveals that Rebecca was suffering from late stage cancer and was not in fact pregnant; she had hoped to goad her husband into murdering her and ruining his own life. His new wife helps Maxim to conceal his involvement in Rebecca’s death, and it is eventually ruled a suicide. In the denouement of the movie, the housekeeper sets the estate on fire, killing Maxim de Winter as well as herself. The play between the cold imagery of the name de Winter and the blazing fire which kills him definitely resonates with the motifs surrounding the Coldbrooks and the inferno that threatens the reclones in Wolfe’s novel. It might also suggest the importance of the housekeeper Mrs. Peters to the plot, and if indeed Colette has been somehow replaced, the best candidate for both her replacement and for Cob’s fiancée is probably Spring Peters, the school teacher.
931
932However, we still have the question of the lock surrounding the door. Given that Conrad, Sr., may have provided for multiple keys, we have suggested that Ern might actually represent a key for one side of the door but not the other. In this case, Arabella could constitute the other key, assuming that the odd proliferation of her reclones is not driven by supply and demand. Alas, we are also still left with the mystery of where Colette went when Ern, Georges, and Mahala return to the Coldbrook mansion. This seems the most difficult of all the textual mysteries for which to proffer an answer. Ern is certain that Colette has gone to the faraway world, yet later she continues to either feign or truly exude ignorance regarding the nature of the door and what lies beyond it. Dane, too, if we believe Ern’s story, seems shocked when he finally gets to see the other side. Colette’s proclamation of love for Dane is also somewhat suspicious. Is it truly his status with the government which allows him entrance to her house, or is he or his “boss” somehow related to Cob, who was the only man who had unlimited access to her apartment? Finally, her presence at the bus station would seem to be limited to communicating with either Georges, Mahala, or Chick. Yet what motive could Georges or Mahala have for working with her? All of these questions are worth considering, but one theory might not be able to answer all of them in a satisfactory manner. Perhaps Colette’s disappearance and the indeterminacy of where she went is tied to a larger plot feature: could Colette have disappeared long before the readers ever met this “Colette”? We have little indication where she went beyond the dream Ern has of her being shoved kicking and screaming into a book.
933
934## Humanity’s Retirement
935
936When we examine the thematic implication of the novel and the world Wolfe constructs, featuring on its surface the murder of a son by a father, a father by a daughter, coupled with a listless and suicidal mother, the actual conclusion Ern gives us makes a terrible kind of sense. The rarest of all murders might be that of a father killing a son, as he claims, but here the violent failings of the past have created a cosmetically pleasing future that is dead inside. Vague material ambitions and muted, submerged feelings, of violence or of love, have created a drugged, deceptive world that is actually insipid, filthy, and completely devoid of morality and respect for life. Rather than realizing Enlightenment ideals, it has achieved almost complete dehumanization: the final end is to burn those who are not needed, discarding them as mere extraneous baggage. In many ways, the image of the drugged man being burnt alive, without being tied down, is a metaphor for this future humanity, sterile and uncomprehending in its final approach to the flames of oblivion. It embodies the text in a way no other image can.
937
938Unlike the world of “The Doctor of Death Island,” *A Borrowed Man* features a sky of limitless beauty, which Ern A. Smithe can appreciate almost instantly: “This is a lovely world, and until a few minutes ago I didn’t know how lovely it is. People are wonderfully fortunate to be born now. I remember a world whose sky was gray with smoke or black with dust” (18). Yet even in this Edenic setting, the reality of humanity is quite different, because it denies the personhood of so many.
939
940Much as in Wolfe’s earlier novella, the possibilities of the future are exhausted almost before they begin, and Ern, of course, has his own spin on the most important features of a thriving and living culture: “Books – real books printed on paper – were the heart and soul of a whole culture that had been mine. Cultures are like people, it seems. Sure, they get old and die; but sometimes they die even when they are not very old at all” (21). With the senescence and death of humanity, what hope of change can there possibly be? The portal to another world, at least according to Ern, might offer enough motivation for humanity to struggle once again. Yet will reaching for that new shore only result in more fiery and destructive wars?
941
942## Some Conclusions
943
944While I have not hesitated to assert that *The Wizard Knight* is a Jungian dream or to name the true “bad guy” in *Home Fires*, here I am going to offer several possible options without coming to a definitive reading, though I think my comments above might stress one of these conclusions more than others.
945
946The first possibility is that there is no subtext in the novel: it is a straightforward noir exploration in which Colette is guilty as charged and the brunt of the commentary about humanity in its self-deluding death throes circumvents any plot concerns. What is left but the frivolous pursuit of some happiness and to enjoy the pleasant veneer that hides the vacuous emptiness beneath?
947
948The second reading is that espoused by Paul Rydeen of the Urth List. He proclaims that there is indeed no emerald mine, only a sophisticated machine which forges them, and that Dane van Petten is then summarily executed by Ern and his body burnt in a furnace. While I have undercut entire volumes and denied them of their surface meaning, I have always felt that symbolically, literally, or otherwise, somehow *everything* is still true, even if it must be reflected in a kind of gnostic or subjective understanding of reality. For this reason, I offer the following conclusions, which attempt to make sense of the most possible details, though admittedly in a disjointed and nebulous fashion. For once, I am determined not to cut off potential interpretations.
949
950The first suggestion is not a truly serious one. It involves the hot and cold imagery in the text. The threat lingering over the head of Ern A. Smithe is of course that of burning: if people lose interest in him, he will be nothing but a waste of resources and will face incineration. When he sits with Colette at the opening, they put their feet in the cool water together (26). At this point, she talks about her brother, and soon says that her job as a teacher is to ignite interest in learning: “[L]ight that fire and puff it into a blaze … Sometimes you don’t know how hot it is until it burns you a little” (27). The secrets that they discuss happen to invoke page two-hundred-twenty-one twice – the page in the Tor edition (with its atypically empty pages compared to, say, *The Land Across* or *The Sorcerer’s House*) which features the image of a drugged out and deluded man being burnt to death. With the constant threat of burning feet, our narrative is but the crazed and drugged delusions of a man about to be incinerated, possibly set in motion at the halfway point in the novel, when Ern is abducted by Payne and Fish. Ern was tied to the chair by Dane and his boss – Payne and Fish think about it but do not bother to tie him, in much the same way that the soon to be incinerated man is not restrained, with the occasional jerk of his foot the only sign that he dreams and still lives in some internal vision. Ern’s feet, too, are oddly prominent in the text. Inconsistencies between the first and second half of the book in this case really don’t matter. Well, isn’t it nice we solved that problem?
951
952Unfortunately, I think the burning man is a metaphor for humanity, complacent in its damnation, rather than a literal statement about Ern as an individual. So let’s try harder. In one reading, Ern A. Smithe is but a forgery of Conrad Coldbrook, Sr., who has lost his wife but seeks a way to gain her back, even if it costs him his children. When his wife dies, he develops a plan. Perhaps all of Ern’s memories are forged as well, and his works ultimately penned by Conrad, like Chatterton before him, who pretended to find poems from antiquity when he actually wrote them himself. Ern is but a vessel in this reading, and Arabella an equally “fake” persona, inspired by the poetry of Edgar Allen Poe. Perhaps Conrad’s plan was to join her, even mingling fragments of their personalities in one body, as the Poe poem might inspire, with its talk of inseparable souls. Arabella, then, might also be a part of his plan. In this reading, just as the book abbreviated MOM is dumped down a laundry shoot to keep it out of the hands of materialists, the fragments of the mother are purified in an entirely new setting, and the love of Conrad, Sr., and his wife “corrected” with a second chance, with most of their original problems erased.
953
954Regardless, the Chatterton allusion suggests that Ern is definitely getting something wrong in his conclusions, and that it might very well involve a “con” (see the code to the locked car doors). The abbreviation for *Murder on Mars*, MOM, might also suggest that the mastermind behind Ern’s creation was not in fact Conrad, Sr., but was the son, Cob, hoping to regain his mother as well. If it was indeed Senior who killed his son, perhaps it was because the only method he had of repairing his damaged wife, the book and its subconscious effects upon a reclone, was taken from him. Rather than the emeralds, the book was ultimately the important thing to him.
955
956However, this would mean that Ern was still an artifact of the father rather than the son. Mention of Chesterton’s take on *The Mystery of Edwin Drood* would implicate Cob rather than his father as the mastermind, and the steps that Ern takes, from his affection for Colette to putting on Cob’s shirt and wondering if his shoes would fit him, might equate him more with the son rather than the father –did reading *Murder on Mars* awaken a portion of Cob’s consciousness inside Ern? This would also allow the “lie” of Colette to be true in some way: Cob did survive his father. It seems certain that *someone* is inside Ern, with a vested interest in Colette. If Arabella is part of this strange design as well, is it to reunite Colette and Cob in a more socially acceptable fashion, almost by proxy, or to allow Joanne Rebecca Carole to live again? We still can’t explain how Conrad or his son have such influence with the various libraries. One motive might certainly be for Senior to give life to a portion of his wife (whose name shares the extra “e” that Smithe’s does) in such a way that is not self-destructive. Yet why hide it in someone else’s memories, fabricated wholesale or not, especially given the grim future reclones face, unless he planned to purchase them and set them free someday?
957
958The central metaphor in this case suggesting that Cob is responsible for the reclones involves Chick Bantz giving Ern three sandwiches. As we have noted, he pours “Swan-n-Sweetheart” into hot chocolate in this scene, and, as Arabella said, it was a gift of chocolate which “greased the skid to hell.” Given the heat imagery associated with Arabella, it seems that something has been introduced to Colette in the end that might achieve a plan set in motion earlier. Chick Bantz has a name which implies a young bird, just as Cob does. In addition, given that Ern identifies himself with a cat and thinks of himself as Puss in Boots, the metaphor of the cars is also pertinent, given that Cob’s is named Canary. Has Cob set in motion the recloning of Arabella and stashed something of himself inside Ern, given the name of the whiskey that Chick pours into the hot chocolate and the coded technique mentioned in the very first chapter, in which invisible ink only becomes visible when it is heated? The introduction of hot Arabella to Colette Coldbrook might enact a similar change, somehow, given the odd fugue that links the two women. In any case, Chick’s role in giving Ern money and the three sandwiches symbolically suggests that Cob is in some fashion behind what is going on.
959
960Now we can attempt another reading, focusing on Colette and the mother rather than the men. Given the violent dream of Colette being forced into a book and the suspicions raised by Payne and Fish, might Colette be an imposter? Ern even waffles on whether he knows that her mother is dead. If Colette were replaced, by a reclone, by the daughter or friend of Judy Peters, or by someone who could even be Cob’s fiancée, was this “new” Colette responsible for killing both Cob (either through using Dane, Roglich, or Georges) and Senior, in her attempt to get to the bottom of a secret which she misunderstood? Why else is there some suspicion cast on Colette’s appearance? It feels as if we simply do not have enough information to draw any firm conclusions regarding this, save the hot and cold imagery and the fact that Colette has a lot in common with Spring Peters, immediately rejoicing when she is reunited with the old housekeeper? If there is nothing fishy about Colette and her mother, then Payne and Fish become almost completely irrelevant (or, I might say, merely a diversionary pain in the ass). Perhaps there was no money in the bag, and we are left with Colette and her accomplices killing first her brother, finding the book in his bag, and then poisoning her father. (This might resonate with the confusion Ern has about Chatterton: he says the boy genius choked on a biscuit when he actually swallowed poison – two fates oddly resonant with the terminal destinies of the Coldbrook men.)
961
962There are two other mysteries: the locked door and the disappearance of Colette. The locked door is easily explained if someone else went through it previously, but it might also be possible that Conrad coded the door so that his final emergency plan, Ern, could open it from the inside. We assert that if Arabella and Ern are a pair, perhaps she is the key which opens the other side. Colette’s disappearance from the house remains a huge problem, and while supposing that she and Dane went through the door somehow before returning might “explain” two mysteries, it does not seem that anything we learn afterwards supports that idea. Why feign ignorance, and why would Dane not be less surprised if he had already been to that faraway world? Then again, where did she go? To repeat what Ern learns on the bus, “*Where has she gone, and why should I care? A woman’s a snake, a woman’s a snare*” (144). Any way we exhume this particular story, it seems that Colette is in some fashion implicated. (The cover of *Murder on Mars* happens to feature the red planet of Mars being strangled by a serpent.) Perhaps the library key which unlocks the doors at Spice Grove or Cob’s card also unlocks the door on that strange planet, allowing both Cob and Ern to return from those distant shores. Indeed, Ern himself might even offer Cob an avenue to return for a time from the shores of death.
963
964Conrad’s fortune, given his false IDs and the idea Colette had that he knew some secret, might be enough to suppose that there were many people interested in gaining a modicum of vengeance against him. One of them might even have been Georges. Colette’s early assessment of her father mentions a fear of illicit behavior:
965
966>“It was because I did trust [Cob], and I was afraid Father had confessed some dreadful secret. He was that kind of man, or at least I thought he might be. I was afraid he’d been blackmailing someone or had recorded a confession to some dreadful crime. … Lonely people like my father keep everything locked inside them, and often they suffer terribly because of it” (30).
967
968Given the possibility of blackmail and a terrible crime, who might this involve? Oddly, concerning *Murder on Mars*, Colette discusses that her father signed his name inside it, and she even considers the possibility that his signature might be forged: “Yes, and that’s his signature. I’ve compared it to every other example I had, and they all match. Or if it’s a forgery. It’s probably good enough to fool an expert” (31). While this also implies that *Murder on Mars* is a forgery, what does it say about her father?
969
970The book begins “*He was neither angel nor devil, but something for which we have only bad words or none, a being young and ancient, neither good nor evil, who knew too well the roads to the farther stars.*” Given the cars Cat (which belonged to Senior) and Canary (which belonged to Cob), is the aphorism true? Has the cat swallowed the canary in a more than literal way, and has Cob engineered a way to inject himself into his father’s odd plans even after his death, making Ern something of a gestalt repository for both of them, being both young and ancient? Is this description at the start of the book actually serving to contextualize the nature of father and son, or is it a mixture of the young Cob and the old and dead Ern A. Smithe? Remember that the saying “Smiling like the cat that ate the canary” implies a smugness over something that has been concealed, usually something prohibited or mischievous.
971
972When Ern first reads the opening of *Murder on Mars*, he notes, “I had read that, too, and I was about to say I hadn’t when it hit me that the words were really a little bit familiar” (31). The copyright date, easily faked, was thirteen years before his death. He also says that the book had a Zistal dust jacket (33). In German, the Zistel is the traditional harvest basket in Wachau apricot cultivation. [Oddly, erntekorb is the word for that harvest basket – resonant with Ern’s first name as well.]
973
974Where is all of this speculation heading? To the idea that somehow Conrad, Sr., may have planned to cheat death and taxes by preparing vessels for himself and his reborn wife in the form of reclones, but that his plans went dreadfully awry, perhaps due to the interference of his son. The motivation for acting through reclones is never clear, and perhaps this, too, is just an empty gesture towards reconciling the motives at work in the text. Ern dismisses that Colette acted out of a desire for money, but it is perhaps too easy to say that her motives are never as pure as she maintains. Certainly, the influence of her brother Cob on Ern might inspire him to treat her lightly and to defend her against Dane.
975
976At the start of the novel, when Colette asks, “What do you think we should do?” Ern states:
977
978>I know that nobody who reads this is going to believe it; but right then was the first time I really and truly understood myself, what I was and what had been done to me, and how unreal all of it had been. I was not the man I thought I was, the one whose name I used – whose name I still use right now, for that matter. I was somebody else, a kid who had been grown from that guy’s DNA and loaded up with his memories, phony memories of things that had never happened to me and never could happen to me. (35-6)
979
980Here he also thinks of shelving Arabella in poetry: “*One by one across the desert/ Until our boots grow too heavy with / The sands of time.*” This is contrasted with the cold water and the smell of Colette’s perfume: “Clear, cold water that could never, ever, wash away the sands” (36).
981
982I will leave it to my readers to determine if they feel that the mention of these ineradicable sands of time refer to events from the life of the original Ern A. Smithe, if he existed, or to the convoluted Coldbrook family drama. Arabella would also seem to be intimately involved in the schemes of the Conrads if Ern was, at least in some part, one of their creations. Of course, it could be that there is no secret concealed inside Ern, and that much of this is merely an attempt to unearth those secrets so tantalizing promised in the opening chapter.
983
984As I said, those who have read my work know that I like to assert rather strongly rather than waffle about possibilities, but there are many reasons to treat this story as unfinished, whether by Wolfe’s design or otherwise. The most difficult aspect of the text involves the idea of disguise: there could be more than one Conrad or even more than one Colette; even a character as relatively minor as Chick Bantz might be far more than he or she appears to be, given certain physical details that might or might not align with descriptions of Joanne Rebecca Carole. If pressed, I would say that Senior’s schemes to be reborn with his wife are frustrated by the meddling of his son, and that somehow *Murder on Mars* awakens a fragment of one or the other inside Ern, but this does not answer every question.
985
986It is time to stop these speculations and come to the best answer, so here it is: what do *you* think, reader? That is the best solution. I never want Wolfe’s worlds to be exhausted, so I beg your forgiveness for changing direction without drawing any solid conclusions. I have deceived you: you thought I was going to tell you what *A Borrowed Man* means, but all I will tell you here at the end is what Gene Wolfe means to me.
987
988## The Author as Hero
989
990As in any project of this size, no doubt I repeat myself from time to time. It wasn’t until I understood Wolfe’s story “The Adopted Father” that I could truly articulate how he felt about the writing process. Much as the main character of that story, who designs parks and laments the fact that his children do not think like he does, while still hoping for a communion with someone whom he can both relate to and somehow serve to protect and teach, Wolfe designs texts for people who are willing to revel in fantasy, creating tricky and complex fictional structures for our amusement. His books also serve as something of a litmus test for those who are willing to think as he does, even if only for a while.
991
992I want to tell a quick story about my own borrowed man, without whom my name might certainly have never seen print. As a small and only child, I read SF and fantasy voraciously. Wolfe quickly became my favorite author, someone who thought sideways in symbolic and interesting ways, creating fascinating worlds and wonderful characters who kept me engrossed and, along with a thousand other characters from fiction, from being lonely – military children move often, and I preferred the comfort of my room and my books to the external world. In graduate school, way back in the year 2000, I chanced upon a database of author’s mailing addresses, and sent Wolfe a fan letter. To my surprise, he responded, and our correspondence grew. His legendary caginess was never fully dropped, but the personal details, the stories, and even the personal advice he gave me in good times and bad proved that I was not wrong in my heroes: this was a kind and great man who was talented and popular enough to have dedicated and devoted fans, but not so overwhelmed with attention to preclude developing personal relationships with some of them. At the Fuller Award Ceremony in Chicago in March of 2012, in an unforgettable and magical evening, the highlight of the night for me included Wolfe’s acceptance speech, when he thanked me for coming. Everyone knows what it is to wait for something for so long, a moment of personal triumph and vindication, but for most of us that moment never comes, or it ends in bitter disappointment. There, that night, I felt something glorious. As I prepared to leave the event, wondering if it would be the last time I ever saw him, I caught Wolfe alone; he was seated at a table, clutching his award. Kneeling by his seat, I told him how grateful I was for him, and I said, “Gene, you’ll always be my hero. And I love you.” Only later would I find that someone had taken a picture of that moment, the strained smile on my face showing the tears I fought to hold back. No moment can last forever. That night, however, this project was born.
993
994Whether Wolfe shall ever finish *Interlibrary Loan*, the sequel to *A Borrowed Man*, remains to be seen. We might ourselves wish to have Gene Wolfe in front of us forever, to take from his shelf and to ask him all of the deepest questions about the multitude of mysterious, impenetrable, and fabulous characters and worlds he has brought to life for us. We can’t have that; instead, we are left only with black letters and white pages, words that dropped from the mind of an immensely unique and talented writer, who worked so hard and gave so much to challenge and to please his readers – his books can surely never be exhausted. As he said in accepting the Science Fiction Grand Master Award at the 2013 Nebula Awards, what he wants most is for someone to point at his work and say, “That’s a good book!” Of course, they were far beyond good – they are timeless and great books produced by a great man –  generous, wise, and kind beyond all expectation. I have borrowed his glory and walked in his overwhelming brilliance for long enough. I believe I have gained something priceless in this journey, and I hope that you, too, have found something of value that you can take and incorporate into your own story. Reader, you will walk no more with me. It is time we both take up our lives.
995
996## Resources
997
998- Aramini, Marc. “*A Borrowed Man* Literary Jokes: Choking vs. Poison.” *Urth Mailing List*. 29 Apr, 30 Apr. Not Currently Archived.
999
1000- Bollen, Andrew. “ABM *** Spoilers ***” *Urth Mailing List*. 25 Oct 2015. Not Currently Archived.
1001
1002- Boswell, James. *Boswell’s Life of Johnson*. Project Gutenberg. 25 Jan 2013. Web. 28 Sep 2018. <http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1564/1564-h/1564-h.htm>
1003
1004- Clute, John. “Scores.” *Strange Horizons*. 2 Nov 2015. Web. 6 Jun 2018. http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/columns/scores-6/)
1005
1006- Felapton, Camestros. “*A Borrowed Man*.” *Camestros Felapton Wordpress*. 22 Dec 2015. Web. 6 Jun 2018. https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2015/12/22/review-a-borrowed-man-by-gene-wolfe/
1007
1008- Gordon, Joan. “The Haunted Library of Gene Wolfe.” *Los Angeles Review of Books*. 3 Mar 2016. Web.6 Jun 2018. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-haunted-library-of-gene-wolfe/
1009
1010- Hlinak, Matt. “*A Borrowed Man* Could Have Used a Real Woman.” *Pop Mythology*. 8 Dec 2015. Web. 6 Jun 2018.  https://www.popmythology.com/gene-wolfe-borrowed-man-review/
1011
1012- Kaplan, Louise J. *The Family Romance of the Impostor-poet Thomas Chatterton*. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989. Print.
1013
1014- Kurzawa, Greg. “The Contents of Ern.” *Urth Mailing List*. 9 Dec 2015, 25 Dec 2015. Not Currently Archived.
1015
1016- Kurzawa, Greg. “A Borrowed Man and Edwin Drood.” *Urth Mailing List*. 15 Apr 2016. Not Currently Archived.
1017
1018- Marques, Antonio Pedro. “A Borrowed Man.” *Urth Mailing List*. 25 Dec 2015. Not Currently Archived. 
1019
1020- Pirkola, Robert. “A Borrowed Man.” *Urth Mailing List*. 11 Dec 2015, 30 Dec 2015, 5 Apr 2016, 18 Apr 2016. Not Currently Archived.
1021
1022- Poe, Edgar Allen. “Annabelle Lee.” Poetry Foundation. 2018. Web. 28 Sep 2018. <https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44885/annabel-lee>
1023
1024- Rydeen, Paul. “A Borrowed Man questions (and spoilers).” 30 Mar 2016, 31 Mar 2016, 1 Apr 2016. Not Currently Archived.
1025
1026- Smith, Clark Ashton. “The Hasish Eater – or – The Apocalypse of Evil.” Eldritch Dark. n.d. Web. 28 Sep 2018. <http://www.eldritchdark.com/writings/poetry/572/the-hashish-eater--or--the-apocalypse-of-evil>
1027
1028- Truesdale, Dave. “A Borrowed Man by Gene Wolfe.” *Tangent Online*. 19 Jan 2016. Web. 6 Jun 2018. https://www.tangentonline.com/component/content/article/280-novel-reviews/3032-a-borrowed-man-by-gene-wolfe)
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1030- Wolfe, Gene. *A Borrowed Man*. New York: Tor Books, 2015. Print.
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1032- Writer Dan. “Review: *A Borrowed Man*.” *Elitist Book Reviews*. 20 Sep 2016. Web. 6 Jun 2018. https://elitistbookreviews.com/2016/09/20/a-borrowed-man/